Dark Blue
by Ashlee Pond
Summary: The moment she strutted into his birthday party in that cop outfit, Amelia Pond challenged everything Sherlock Holmes thought he knew. She's intelligent & feisty & their chemistry is explosive. After a night of passion she promises that she'll return to him. Now she's back with the madman in the blue box, ready to prove Holmes wrong again. - Pre- & mid-series era fic, Pondlock.
1. Part One: First Impressions

**a.n. **Wooo, my first ever Pondlock. & my first ever attempt at writing the insanely hard to get right Sherlock, so please let me know how I went! This chapter is set pre-series BBC Sherlock, & in the middle of The Eleventh Hour for Doctor Who (Series 5, Episode 1). There are _a stack _of references to Little Amy's encounter with the Doctor in this; cookies to anyone who can spot them & let me know in a review. :) Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy!

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**- Dark Blue -**

**First Impressions**

Amy Pond was used to people staring at her. Eleven years of insisting your imaginary friend the Raggedy Doctor is real and you get used to being looked at as though you're mentally unstable, and six months of working as a kissogram and you get used to being looked at as though you're being mentally undressed. Being looked at as though you're a puzzle to figure out, though – well, she hadn't been looked at like that for a while now. Past experience dictated that a good bite would wipe that stupid analytical expression right off this stranger's stupid, chiselled face, but Amy was here to do a job, and she could really use the money this week.

So she bared her teeth in a wide smile and sashayed across to where he sat at the bar, swinging her hips and purring, "I have a special warrant for one Mr Holmes."

His steely blue eyes widened at her words, for just the briefest of moments, before narrowing again into a look akin to disgust. Her smile twitched, but she managed to keep it in place, even if it did look a bit more forced than flirtatious.

"Apparently you've been a very naughty boy," she continued on with the scripted lines that went with the police uniform she was wearing, swinging the handcuffs looped through her belt around one finger.

"You can stop there, thank you," Holmes said, his tone polite but his expression – aimed not at her but at the man over her shoulder, who had introduced himself as Greg and pointed her in the birthday boy's direction – murderous.

"Ah," she tutted, wagging a finger at him as she stopped right in front of his bar stool. "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

He rolled his eyes, looking thoroughly unimpressed with the whole thing, and muttered, "You're Scottish, not American."

Amy blinked at him, not sure if she should be offended. So she watched a lot of trashy television, so what? He didn't look like he'd meant his words to be malicious, though; nor did he look nervous, just… _bored_. What, was he gay or something? Normally even the most straight laced of guys got a bit flustered when she was up this close, all long legs and short skirt and darkly lashed eyes. But this Holmes guy was giving her nothing. Perhaps she'd have to do a bit of improvisation.

She grabbed the end of his scarf and pulled him forward, leaning down so that their faces were only centimetres apart. "Don't be scared though, I don't bite." She winked and added in a sultry whisper, "That'll cost you extra."

For a moment she thought he was going to laugh - like all the other people at the party, who had gathered around in a circle - but apart from the briefest of flashes in his blue eyes, Holmes' expression remained the same; completely disinterested. Amy pouted, biting the inside of her cheek and deciding that his mates really mustn't have had a clue what he liked if they'd hired a kissogram for his party and this was the response. She looked down at the scarf in her hand, and for a second she forgot where she was and allowed herself to just rub the pad of her thumb against the soft woollen material, noting that the colour matched the sky outside.

Holmes cleared his throat, causing Amy to look up with a start and drop the scarf. Now, she saw, he looked amused. And suddenly she felt mad, because this was supposed to be a laugh, like all the other parties she did; she was supposed to come in, embarrass the birthday boy, give him a quick kiss that left him a bit flustered and red faced, and then saunter out of the party with a nice sum of money in her pocket. But of course he was being difficult, and now he had the nerve to smirk at her, with the slightest tint of pity in his eyes. If there was one look Amy Pond couldn't stand people giving her, it was the look that said they thought they were better than her.

She perched herself on his lap, one of her legs either side of his, and set her hands on his shoulders. _Now _she had his attention, and she'd wiped that stupid look right off his arrogant face. With the power back in her hands, Amy stooped down and put her lips beside his ear, whispering, "Happy Birthday, Holmes."

She pressed her mouth to his, in a soft, seductive kiss that earned a few wolf-whistles from the other party guests, but that got no response at all from Holmes himself. Undeterred – because this was a matter of _pride_, now – Amy applied more pressure, and snaked one of her hands up into his curls, twirling them around her fingers. And _finally_ she got a positive response.

He kissed her back, hesitently at first, but then with more confidence. He tasted like tobacco, strong tobacco, but his lips were soft and there was a good amount of give and take to the kiss that made her fingers curl just a little bit tighter over his shoulder. His hands didn't touch her, remaining awkwardly by his sides, until she pulled away, beaming at her victory, and he gently laced his fingers over the inside of her wrist, right over her beating pulse.

"Enjoy the rest of your night," Amy said, sliding off him and pulling down her impossibly short skirt.

He didn't reply, just moved his hand back into his coat pocket and stared at her impassively. She knew she'd won, though, and the way she smiled at him let him know it, too.

Greg had her money ready, and she took the cash from him with a grateful smile, wishing him a good night too before she excused herself from the rowdy pub and stepped back out into the crisp night air, shrugging her leather jacket over her shoulders as she went.

She'd had to travel all the way from Leadworth to London for this party – by train, because no one trusted her to drive their cars, no matter how many times she'd told them to come off it, because she wasn't _that _bad at driving. Yeah, she'd only had her licence for a bit over a week, but she couldn't be any more deadly than Mels on the road, could she? With a sigh, Amy began to walk down the street, past the queue of people waiting to get inside, her heels clicking against the pavement with each step.

"A cab is the quickest way to get back to the station," a voice said from behind her, and she spun around to see Holmes coming down the front steps of the pub, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. He lifted it to his lips when he reached the sidewalk and took a deep drag in, blowing out a puff of smoke but never once taking his eyes off her.

She hitched her jacket up higher and considered telling him to mind his own business, but instead surprised herself by asking, "Who says I'm going to the train station?"

He smirked at that, as though she'd asked just the question he'd been waiting to hear, and then began to roll off his explanation in a steady stream of speech. "You have no bag, just that jacket, and no car keys are in those pockets, because one's got your excessively large wallet in it and the other your phone, which you love and wouldn't allow to be scratched by keys, and your hand, which is clenched around your phone as a precautionary measure so that it's within easy reach in case anyone approaches you, which they probably will; a girl in a skirt that short, alone, at this time of night? You're right to be scared."

Amy grit her teeth. "I'm not scared."

Sherlock continued on as if she hadn't spoken, "The absence of any form of keys, not just car keys but house keys, too, indicates that you live in a small town, somewhere you could leave home without worrying about locking the front door, which makes it too far out from London for a cab ride to be feasible, leaving your next destination as the train station."

Amy narrowed her eyes at him, tilting her head to the side and saying testily, "I'm staying with a friend. In London."

"No, you're not." Holmes took another drag of his cigarette, still smirking at her.

"I am!"

Amy felt her temper bubbling over, and crossed her arms over her chest. She should just keep walking, away from this stupid, strange man who thought he knew better than she did. But Amy was more than capable of looking after herself, and a part of her wanted to stay and find out more about this enigmatic stranger with the dark curls and the long coat, who was still looking at her if she were a particularly frustrating puzzle.

"Pretty terrible friend then, leaving you to walk home alone," Holmes said blandly, stepping towards her. Amy didn't step back, meeting his piercing gaze evenly. "You're cold," he stated, glancing down at her stocking-clad legs and then back up to her eyes.

"I'm fine," she retorted, even though it was London, and it was night, so of course she was cold.

"Are you going to disagree with everything I say?"

He dropped his cigarette to the ground between them and extinguished it with the toe of his polished shoe, and Amy took the time he wasn't looking at her to observe the details of his face; the angular cheekbones, the prominent cupid's bow that she'd just kissed – and then his light blue eyes were focused on her again, the streetlight behind her reflected in the irises.

"Probably," she informed him, sounding slightly smug.

He didn't respond to that, just started slowly unwinding his dark blue scarf from around his neck. He held it out to her, and when she stared at it blankly he sighed heavily, as though she were being incredibly thick and could she please catch up, she was wasting his time.

"You're cold," he repeated, sending a small gust of cigarette tainted breath at her, "Take my scarf."

"Oh, no," she said, suddenly polite, "I couldn't."

"Take it," he insisted, practically shoving it into her hand. "I don't offer my things to others very often, you should be grateful."

"Well aren't you a charming fellow?" Amy mumbled, but she took the scarf and looped it around her own neck anyway. She was glad for the extra warmth, so she added a louder, "Thank you."

"Your favourite colour?" He spoke again, and this time it sounded a bit more like a question.

She blinked up at him. "What?"

"Blue. It's your favourite colour, isn't it?"

"How did you -"

"You were distracted by my scarf in the pub earlier," Holmes elaborated, delicately skipping over the _just before we snogged _part, "And while it's a lovely material, most people don't get sentimental about wool. Colours, rather, can trigger all sorts of emotions."

"I wasn't getting _sentimental,_" Amy almost spat out.

Holmes raised an eyebrow. "You're holding onto the scarf like it's a life line."

She looked down and saw that she was, indeed, clutching at the scarf with both of her hands, pressing it against her collarbones. "Shut up," she muttered, embarrassed.

"So, what was it that made you love the colour? Was it the colour of your house back in Scotland? Does it remind you of your favourite loch?" Holmes asked, rattling off possibilities.

Amy scoffed, "Remind me of my favourite loch; really?"

Holmes levelled his gaze at her. "You haven't lived in Scotland for years, since you were a child, well before the age of accent acquisition has passed, but you've kept yours relatively strong. You don't fit in in your small English town, that much is obvious. So perhaps you like the colour blue because it's the colour of the sky, the one you look up at night and the same one you looked up at when you were a little girl who'd just arrived in a strange new town with no friends, wishing on stars for a way out."

Amy felt indignation colouring her cheeks, and wrenched her hands away from the scarf and into fists at her sides. "You're wrong."

"I'm never wrong."

"Well you are this time. You're wrong and you're stupid."

Holmes said, without any inflection at all, "You've missed your train."

Amy lifted her arm to look at the small, gold watch on her left wrist, and gasped when she saw he was right – the last train back to Leadworth had just left the station. Without her on it.

"You made me miss my train!" She shrieked.

One corner of Holmes' mouth twisted up. "I thought you were staying with a friend."

Amy took a deep breath in, preparing to scream at him, but instead she just let out a low growl and hit him once on the arm before turning on her heel and storming away with no idea of where she was going.

"Take care of my scarf, Amelia," Holmes called out after her casually, and she stopped in her tracks.

"What did you call me?"

"Your name," Holmes said, "Amelia Pond."

She stalked back to him and poked him in the chest, her green eyes boring into him with an intensity that made her lean frame seem suddenly ferocious. "My _name _is Amy. _Not _Amelia."

"Your ID says otherwise," Holmes stated simply.

"Are you _stalking _me?" Amy asked incredulously.

Holmes actually laughed at that. "No, merely observing. You wear a necklace with the letter A on it around your neck, so there's your first initial. You're young, still a teenager, but your profession requires you to be over the age of eighteen, so you were born in eighty-nine, then, which narrows down the possibilities of your name considerably. A glimpse inside your wallet confirmed your name is Amelia Pond."

"Don't call me that," Amy hissed, glaring up at him.

Holmes met her gaze evenly. "You prefer Amy."

She faltered for a moment, her anger diminishing slightly in the face of his calm, and she told him, "Yes."

"Interesting," he said, tapping the fingers of his right hand against the outside of his coat pocket.

"And what's your name then?" Amy inquired. "You seem to know all this stuff about me and I know nothing about you, except for the fact that your last name is Holmes and today is your birthday."

"Sherlock," Holmes said.

Amy giggled despite herself, and he scowled.

"Well, Sherlock, how old are you turning today?" She asked.

Holmes shook his head, the corners of his lips turned up in a secretive smile. "Older than you."

"That much is obvious," Amy sighed, and then started appraising him. "I'd say, what, mid-twenties? Maybe twenty-five, twenty-six?" He didn't say anything, and she lifted her chin up haughtily. "Well, either way, you're an older man who's just come out of a pub, accosted an eighteen year old girl on the street and made her miss her only train home, so you're not really in a great moral position now, are you?"

He narrowed his eyes at that, but she thought she could maybe see a glint of amusement in them.

"You're a kissogram," he drawled, "Are you ever in a good moral position?"

"Hey now!" She exclaimed, reeling back. "Don't go insulting my job. It's a laugh!"

She could definitely see amusement in his eyes now, even as he kept his expression blank. "To some people, I'm sure it is."

"Oh of course you're going to pretend you didn't enjoy it," Amy grumbled, "You're one of those serious cops, aren't you? All straight laced and professional."

"I'm as much a part of the police force as you are," Holmes told her, looking absolutely appalled by the idea.

Amy looked down at her sexy police woman outfit. The skirt and heels were a tad impractical, and the vest was designed specifically to flatter her shape, but the costume had all the logos and everything; she was even wearing a matching hat, her red hair tucked up in a bun underneath. It could have been a pretty convincing get up, she thought, maybe even to someone as clever as Holmes – if she hadn't just been hired to snog him.

Choosing not to defend her outfit out loud, Amy said, "But Greg specifically requested the police costume, and he's a copper -"

"Lestrade is a police man, yes," Holmes said, "But I most certainly am not. There's too much bureaucracy and idiocy on the police force. _I _am a consulting detective."

Amy blinked. "I've never heard of that before."

"Of course you haven't, I invented the job," Holmes told her, as though this was completely obvious. "I'm the only one in the world."

Amy laughed outright at that. "You _invented _your job?"

Holmes raised his upper lip in what might have been a sneer. "There was nothing else that interested me."

Amy was thoroughly intrigued now. "So how does it work, then? What do you do?"

"When the police are struggling to solve a case, which is always, they call me," Holmes explained.

"And what, you just sweep in and solve it, just like that?" Amy questioned.

"I figured you out 'just like that'," Holmes retorted, and Amy was silenced. He continued, "I'm good at what I do. But it's boring at the moment. There hasn't been a remotely interesting case in weeks."

"It's your birthday, you can't be bored on your birthday!" She exclaimed, as though this was a travesty. "Come on, what do you want to do? What will 'interest' you?"

Holmes smiled at that, a big genuine smile that almost took Amy by surprise with its niceness. "I feel like I should warn you; I'm not a normal person, Amy."

"That doesn't worry me; trust me. And you're the only person in the city I know," Amy stated, shrugging her shoulders. "And you made me miss the last train home. So what else am I meant to do but entertain the birthday boy?"

"Will you charge me for this?" Holmes asked, his delivery so cutting that she couldn't tell if he was joking.

She nudged his arm. "What, consulting detective doesn't pay well?"

He screwed his mouth up and coughed into his palm, avoiding the question. "I know a good Chinese place," was all he said.

Amy's face lit up, but her smile dropped as she remembered the party gathered inside the pub for Holmes' party. "What about your friends, won't they notice you're gone and start to worry?"

Holmes laughed again, and shook his head. "They're all so intoxicated they won't notice I'm gone. They wouldn't care anyway."

"That's a horrible thing to say," Amy scolded. "They cared enough to throw you a birthday party, didn't they?"

"So they could hire a kissogram to make me uncomfortable," Holmes countered, and if Amy had been the type to get embarrassed she would have blushed at the look he gave her then.

Instead, she just said, "Oh, shut up and take me to this Chinese place then. I'm cold and hungry."

"You said you weren't cold earlier," Holmes said as he walked to the curb and held out an arm to hail them a cab.

"I thought we'd established that I was lying," Amy replied, smirking at him. When the cab pulled up in front of them she slid in before him and quipped over her shoulder, "By the way, this is your shout; I was going to walk, remember?"


	2. Part One: Companion

**a.n. **So they're both a little feisty in this chapter, but I can't imagine Sherlock Holmes and Amy Pond not having a few stubborn arguments over nothing. Sorry the update took so long, I was swamped by uni assignments, but now I'm on holidays for a bit and I've already got a bit of the next chapter done, so it should be up pretty soon - _very _soon if I get reviews! It's shaping up to be a pretty fun one... Actually this whole story is turning out to be fun to write. I hope it's fun for you to read!

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**- Companion -**

Sherlock Holmes was quite possibly the most interesting person Amy had ever met, besides her Raggedy Doctor. He had a sort of restrained air about him, as though he was trying very hard to be aloof and distant, while inside his mind was quite manic. She could see it in his eyes as he watched her eat, devouring every little movement she made and mannerism she had in much the same way as she was devouring the dumplings on her plate.

"It's rude to stare, ya know," she said around a mouthful, pointing a chopstick at him accusingly.

"I've been told it's also rude to talk with food in your mouth," Holmes responded, looking completely unfazed.

Amy scoffed and went back to her meal, trying to ignore the feeling of her phone vibrating in her pocket – a panicked Rory, no doubt - and the awkward fact that she was the only one at their table eating. When she'd asked Holmes why he wasn't ordering anything he'd told her that he wasn't hungry, simple as that; but she could see beneath his big, navy coat that he had a thin frame, thinner even than Rory's, and his face was bordering on gaunt, his pale skin stretched over high cheekbones and the beginnings of light grey bags shadowing his icy blue eyes. Maybe he wasn't eating because he couldn't afford it, she thought with a sudden bolt of concern.

"Are you sure you don't want anything?" She asked him again, after swallowing her mouthful. "You paid for the cab, so I could pay for your meal -"

"I can afford my own food," he cut her off sharply, his eyes looking past her at something on the other side of the restaurant. He added as a quiet, sarcastic afterthought, "Thank you."

Amy blinked. "I never said you couldn't afford it; I was just trying to be nice."

Holmes slowly, steadily brought his gaze back to her. She held his stare determinedly, trying not to feel intimidated as he analysed her reaction to his words. "You didn't have to say it. You were scanning me, determining how loose my coat is, how thin my face is, and of course you jumped to the first and stupidest assumption of me having a lack of funds."

"It's not a stupid assumption!" Amy exclaimed, all worry about offending the man now gone. "You're being all defensive, which just proves that it was a totally valid thought."

Holmes gave her a withering look. "I am not being defensive. I'm just telling you the truth."

There was a stretch of time, then, where Amy glared down at her plate and continued eating in tense silence, and Holmes returned his gaze back to whatever was so fascinating on the other side of the room.

Amy considered going, just finishing her meal and then leaving Holmes alone, but realised that she really didn't have much choice in the matter now. She had enough money on her for either a hotel for the night or food for the week, not both, and she knew which of those she'd prefer to spend her hard earned pay on. Someone could come and get her from Leadworth, she supposed – and then dismissed the thought immediately, because she wouldn't suffer through Mels teasing her or Rory chastising her for the entire trip back home, and Aunt Sharon was off God knows where for the night. So that left her alone in London, with Sherlock Holmes, who had made her miss her train, invited her to dinner and was now sitting back in his chair directly opposite her, and yet was acting as though she wasn't even with him. She stabbed a dumpling violently with her chopstick and took a large bite out of it, cursing the universe and wishing – as she often did at moments like this, when things didn't go the way she wanted them to – that her Raggedy Doctor would come back and whisk her away in his blue box.

Her meal was nearly over and her phone was buzzing again when Holmes next spoke. He was looking at her again, his blue eyes focused on her green ones, when he said, "You should probably call your boyfriend back. He's just going to keep ringing."

"What?" Amy asked indelicately, dropping her chopsticks onto her plate with a clatter.

"Your boyfriend," Holmes repeated, nodding curtly at her vest pocket. "He's rang three times now, and it's safe to assume he's going to keep ringing until you assure him that you're okay."

"Rory isn't my boyfriend," were for some reason the first words that toppled out of Amy's mouth. Holmes raised one eyebrow at her but didn't say a word. She sighed, "Alright, well, maybe he thinks he is. Maybe he is. I don't know. It's complicated."

"It's simple," Holmes countered.

Amy glared at him. "It is not _simple_. You don't know Rory – You don't even know _me_, how can you say it's simple?" Holmes opened his mouth to respond, but she held up a hand, effectively cutting him off. "Actually, no. Don't bother. And I'm not going to ask how you even knew my phone was ringing in the first place."

He looked disappointed at that, which made her feel a little bit better. She stuck her hand in her vest pocket and curled her fingers around the cold metal case of her mobile, tapping one of her nails, coated in metallic blue polish, against the back. "I should return his call, though."

Without checking to see Holmes' reaction she stood up, grabbing her phone but leaving her hat and jacket and his scarf slung over the back of her chair, and headed out onto the street to call Rory back. The night had gotten cooler in the hour or so that they'd been at the restaurant, and she regretted not bringing her coat with her. But she was relatively sheltered from the wind if she stayed close to the door, and she planned on this being a quick call, anyway.

Rory picked up on the second ring, his panic spilling down the phone as he said her name. "Amy?"

"Yeah, hey," she greeted, sounding casual but internally berating herself for ignoring him for so long.

"Where are you, are you okay?" He asked in one big question, and then paused before adding, "You didn't answer my calls."

"I know, I'm sorry," she apologised, genuinely meaning it. "I lost track of time… I missed the last train home."

"You _what_?" Rory sounded both incredulous and disappointed.

"Shut up," she said automatically, defensively, tugging at the collar of her police uniform. "You're the one who wouldn't lend me your car."

He ignored her last comment and immediately went into protective mode. "Where are you? I'll come get you, just find somewhere warm to wait and -"

"No, don't do that, it's fine, I'm fine," Amy assured him. "You don't have to come get me, you've got the early shift at the hospital tomorrow."

"Stuff the hospital, what about you?" Rory retorted, and if she hadn't been so stubbornly self-sufficient Amy would have thought that was very sweet.

"I told you, I'm fine," she repeated, more firmly this time.

And then he asked the question she'd been dreading, "But where will you stay? I don't want you staying in a hostel or something…"

Amy cleared her throat and said quickly, trying to get it over and done with, "I'm staying with a friend."

"A friend?" Rory echoed back. "You have a friend in London?"

"He's not _my_ friend, exactly; he's the son of one of Aunt Sharon's friends," she lied, shrugging her shoulders for emphasis even though Rory couldn't see them.

"_He_?!" Rory exclaimed. She slapped herself on the forehead and grit her teeth in preparation of the rant she knew was coming. "You're staying with a strange man in London?! Amy, you can't -" Rory sounded about as close to angry as he ever got with her, and she felt herself bristling.

"I can, Rory," she snapped, the words coming out more harshly than she'd meant them to. "I can, and I am. I told you, he knows Aunt Sharon." The lie stuck in her throat, forcing her to continue on in a slightly softer tone, "You're not driving all the way up here to get me when you have work so early tomorrow. I'll be fine, you know I can take care of myself."

She heard him sigh, sad and already defeated, even as he tried to argue, "I know, Amy, but -"

"No buts. It's all sorted and there's nothing you can do about it," she said with finality. "Don't worry about me, I'll be back in boring old Leadworth by the time you leave the hospital tomorrow."

Rory sighed, and she could imagine him rubbing his forehead, creased into a frown. "Alright," he said, sounding not at all happy about it.

"Try to get some sleep!" Amy advised, practical rather than emotional. "And I'll see you tomorrow afternoon."

"Okay. Be safe," Rory warned.

"I will," Amy said with an exaggerated sigh, trying to tell him that she really could look after herself and he didn't need to worry about her all the time. She was practically more of a boy than he was when it came to being able to protect herself, so she didn't see why he was flustered about her staying in London.

Rory's voice floated through the phone, "I love you."

Ah. That was why, of course.

Amy bit the inside of her cheek and then said, "I'll see you tomorrow. Sweet dreams."

She hung up before he could say any more, pushing down the guilt pooling in her stomach. Stupid Rory and his stupid emotions. She brushed her red hair back behind her ears and clutched the phone tightly, looking down at the pink case and mentally cursing Rory for being so goddamn sweet and stupid. She squeezed her eyes shut, inhaled and exhaled a deep breath, and turned around to go back inside –

But Holmes was already right behind her, holding her belongings and raking his eyes over her face in a manner that now felt even more invasive than before.

"How long have you been standing there?" Amy asked once she'd recovered from the shock.

"Not long," Holmes replied.

"Were you eavesdropping?" She advanced threateningly towards him and snatched her jacket out of his hands.

"No," he said, watching her tug her arms violently into the leather sleeves, "I didn't have to. You were speaking loud enough for half the street to hear."

Amy gaped at him, her left arm stuck at an awkward angle, protruding out to the side as she struggled to get her jacket on properly. "I was not!"

"You were," Holmes insisted, his eyes laughing at her. He gestured to the line of people waiting to get in to the pub on the corner. "Everyone in that line now knows that you're spending the night at my house."

"Who says I'm staying at your house?!"

She finally managed to wrench her arm in to the sleeve, and yanked her jacket up forcefully. She snatched her police hat from his hand and shoved it onto her head, pulling the brim down and then tilting her chin up to glare at him defiantly.

He kept his gaze levelled on her, the light from the restaurant casting shadows on the hollows of his face and making his eyes shine. "You do. You had the choice of going home tonight, but rather than have your boyfriend come pick you up, you'd prefer to stay with me."

"I never said that," she spat venomously, feeling as angry at herself as she was at him.

He smiled at that, a smug, sarcastic sort of smile that made Amy want to slap him, and said, "Well if you're not coming with me I suppose this is goodbye, Amelia Pond."

And then Holmes looped his scarf around his neck and stepped past her, out onto the street. He was at the curb, arm outstretched to hail a cab, when she finally pulled together a response.

"Hey, I'd like the scarf back!"

He spun around to look back at her and his coat swirled around his legs. "Would you?" He asked, bemused.

Amy scampered down the steps and joined him on the curb, stretching herself to her full height and trying her best to be imposing. "I would."

Holmes dropped his arm back to his side and turned to fully face her, one corner of his mouth raised slightly higher than the other in a smirk. He stated, "When I gave it to you, I didn't intend for the exchange to be a permanent one."

"Well you didn't specify that, did you?" She pointed out.

His smirk turned into a smile. "No, I didn't."

Amy grinned up at him, thinking that she'd won this round as well, and held out a hand expectantly. When he merely laughed, her face fell. "Hand it over then," she said impatiently. "I'm a bit cold."

"Why don't we make a deal, Amy?" Holmes' tone was suddenly charming, his smile flirtatious and his eyes dancing.

Amy folded her arms over her chest and stepped back. "What sort of deal?" She asked warily.

"You come back to my house, I give you the scarf. To keep," he offered bluntly, as though it were a business deal.

She titled her head to the side. "Are you flirting with me?"

"Flirting isn't my strong suit," he replied, and something about the way he said it – as though the words were smooth and easy to say on the surface, but jagged and painful underneath – made her believe him.

Amy liked to consider herself a pretty good judge of character, and so far she was quite liking Sherlock Holmes, even if he was a bit of a know-it-all prat that seemed to enjoy antagonising her. But logic dictated that she had to ask, "You're not a murderer or anything, are you?"

"No, I can assure you I have no desire to murder you, nor bring any harm to you at all," he told her plainly.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "And no funny business? You don't… You better not think I'm a prostitute or anything, because I am telling you right now I stop at kissing -"

His face took on a funny pink tinge at her words, and he cleared his throat awkwardly. Suddenly he couldn't seem to meet her eyes.

"No, I'm not interested in any of that. No. I just – I live on my own, and some companionship might be nice."

"So you just want to, like, hang out?" Amy asked, mentally weighing up her options and trying to decide how trustworthy Holmes was. He was certainly far from ordinary, but hey, when had Amelia Pond ever wanted ordinary?

"Yes," he affirmed, unclenching his hands, which had curled into fists at his sides, as though he was relieved that she was understanding. "Just for company."

"A companion," Amy said, rolling the syllables on her tongue. She quite liked how they sounded. "You want me to be a companion. Just for the night?"

"Just for the night," he echoed after her, nodding.

She pursed her lips in a show of thought and pretended to mull the option over, even though she'd already made her mind up to stay with him, and even though he probably _knew_ that she'd already made her decision.

"How can I trust you?" She asked anyway, her voice low and her eyes searching.

There was the briefest of pauses, and then Holmes said simply, "You can't."

Amy's lips broke out into a grin at that. At least _he_ told the truth; and that made him trustworthy, didn't it?

"Alright then. I'll be your companion for the night, Holmes," she said excitedly.

He didn't look like he quite believed she'd agreed, at first, but then he smiled at her – that same big, genuine, heart-warmingly sweet smile that he'd given her when she'd agreed to dinner – and said, "Call me Sherlock."


	3. Part One: Bored

**a.n. **Thank you so much for all of the feedback and support this story has been getting! I'm so happy you're all enjoying it. Sorry about the delay in updates, I just couldn't quite get Sherlock right in this chapter and I wasn't happy with it, so I didn't want to upload it until I was. Just a reminder that at this point in time both characters are young - Sherlock is new to working with the police force and hasn't yet met John, and the Doctor hasn't come back for Amy yet (she was nineteen when he came back and she whacked him with the cricket bat).

* * *

**- Bored -**

Sherlock Holmes lived in a small apartment on Montague Street, nothing too impressive from the outside but nice enough once you got inside – even if it did look like a bomb had hit it. Amy spun around the small living area in a slow circle, taking in the messy piles of books, scientific equipment and general clutter that was spilling out over every surface. She idly picked up a red sock from where it was lying on the back of an armchair and tossed it aside.

"Thanks for getting the place tidy for me," she joked, wrinkling her nose as she spotted what she hoped wasn't a pair of underwear hanging off the arm of the desk chair. She let out a sigh of relief when she looked closer and realised it was just an old jumper.

Holmes at least had the grace to look mildly embarrassed. He ducked in front of her and darted about the room, quickly gathering items together and throwing them through a doorway into a room she couldn't see. When he returned there was room to sit comfortably on the two armchairs, and the space didn't feel as crowded. But, now that he had her there, Holmes didn't quite seem to know what he was meant to do. So the two of them just sat awkwardly across from each other in his lounge, until Amy cleared her throat and gestured into the kitchen, which had a chemistry set on the bench and two beakers filled with dark red liquid bubbling away on the stove. God, she hoped that wasn't blood.

She pushed the thought away and asked politely, "Do you have any tea?"

"Yes," Holmes replied too quickly to be casual, jumping up out of his chair and stalking off into the kitchen in an instant. "How do you like it?"

"Green?" Amy requested, even though she knew it was a long shot.

The blank look she received spoke volumes.

"Green tea? That's what you drink?"

She rolled her eyes and told him, "Yeah, I like green tea. But that's okay, milk and two sugars is fine."

He ducked back into the kitchen and she heard some clattering, which she assumed was him searching for two clean cups, followed by the sound of running water. While he prepared the beverages, Amy took to wandering about the apartment. She saw a pile of papers on the mantle above the soot-covered fireplace and picked them up, leafing through them but not even trying to comprehend the notes scribbled across the pages, which she assumed were for crimes Holmes was working on. Or maybe he'd already solved them and just hadn't cleaned up the paperwork; it wouldn't surprise her with the state of the rest of the apartment.

_Orange nail polish. The cat. Allergic to citrus. 12.05pm, Sunday. _

Putting the notes back down, a wooden case similar in design to an old fashioned jewellery box caught Amy's eye. She stepped over a pile of old newspapers that were sitting in front of the fireplace and ran her fingers over the ornate carvings, a pattern of swirls that looped around the edges and corners, joining together in the centre to form the shape of a crown. Carefully, she lifted the lid and stretched onto the tips of her toes to see the inside of the box – which was filled with small, clear bags, each containing a fine white powder. Vaguely horrified and strangely curious, she plucked one of the bags from the box and held it up in front of her, watching the crystals roll as she tilted it between her fingers.

"Do you search every house you visit?"

She dropped the lid back down with a thud and jumped around to see Holmes standing in the archway that led to the kitchen, staring at her with dark eyes.

"Only the ones that have drugs in them," she replied smartly, waving the small bag she was still holding at him.

"Could you put that back, please? It's rather expensive, I'd prefer for you not to lose it," he requested, his voice flat and calm in a very practiced way, as though he was trying very hard not to get angry.

"What is it?" She asked, stepping closer to him.

"Cocaine," he replied simply. "As I said, not cheap to replace, so do please return it to where you found it."

"You do coke?" Amy looked Holmes up and down, once again noting how thin he was, and wondered why someone as apparently clever as him would be interested in drugs.

He sighed and stepped forwards to meet her, snatched the bag from her hand, and put it back in the wooden case on the mantelpiece. "Occasionally," he told her.

"Why?" When he gave her a withering look she snapped, "Don't look at me like that! You invite me back to your house and I find out you have a cocaine stash, I think I'm allowed to ask a few questions."

His shoulders rose and then lowered with a silent sigh, and he spun around and disappeared back into the kitchen. Amy hurried forward, ready to keep defending herself, but stopped short when she saw him grabbing two cups of tea from the bench.

"If I'm going to answer your questions, you have to answer mine, too," Holmes said, carefully carrying the teacups across to Amy. "And we might as well do it over tea."

Surprised, she silently took her pink cup from him and sat back in the armchair she'd occupied earlier, with a view out the window to the inky night sky. She watched Holmes slide into the chair opposite her, bending his long limbs and managing to look elegant even as he drank tea from a chipped mug with the words '_Nice cuppa' _written in glaring orange lettering across the side. Obviously he didn't do the dishes as often as he should, she observed wryly.

"So," he said after taking a sip. "What would you like to know?"

"Oh," Amy said stupidly, suddenly shy. There were kids at her school who sometimes skipped class to get high, but she'd never actually spoken to any of them about doing drugs before, and she was pretty sure they didn't do cocaine anyway, so she wasn't quite sure where to begin. "Why do you do it, I suppose?"

Holmes seemed to look at her and yet through her as he replied, "Because I get bored."

"You get _bored_?" She repeated incredulously. "You get bored and your first thought is, 'I know, I'll get high'?"

"You go looking for a job and your first choice is kissogram, not at a shop or some other similarly normal place of employment for a teenage girl?" He rebutted, "I think you know just as well as I do how torturous being bored can be."

For a few seconds Amy was stumped, because he had a point. She'd decided to be a kissogram – a controversial job anywhere, but especially in a place as small as Leadworth – because she was desperate for something even vaguely exciting to happen in her life. Going to parties to snog people was better than standing behind a till all day, bored out of her brains.

She searched for a way to press her point, and eventually said lamely, "Well, yeah, but kissing people isn't exactly _risky, _is it? Not like doing drugs. And I mean, aren't there other things you could do when you get bored besides get high? Like, I don't know… go see a movie, or visit friends, or -"

He interrupted her, saying coldly, "I don't have friends."

She stared at him over the rim of her teacup. "Excuse me?"

"I don't have friends," he repeated, a bit easier this time. "So you see how life may get tedious with no one's company but my own."

"But you must have friends," Amy insisted. "All those people at your party tonight, weren't they your -"

"Colleagues, if you stretch the term," Holmes cut her off again. "They all work for the police force and the majority of them don't approve of my methods of investigation. They're jealous, I think, because I highlight their incompetence."

"Well if you talk about them like that all the time I can see why they don't class you as a friend," Amy said, voice low. "What about family, then? Surely you've got relatives."

Of course this was a long shot, because Amy knew full well how frustrating relatives could be. She and Aunt Sharon stretched their relationship to the absolute ends of its tether and they were barely even in the house together; she couldn't imagine spending more time with her aunt than what she did now.

So she wasn't all that surprised when Holmes told her, "None that I will freely associate with, no. My brother Mycroft also lives in the city, and he occasionally imposes himself on me at Mother's request, but that is the limit of our association."

"I know how relatives can be," Amy said amicably. "I live with my Aunt Sharon, and we fight a fair bit. Well, when she's home, anyway. She's out most of the time. Generally just likes to tell me that I'm making the wrong life choices and then flit off with her boyfriend."

"Where are your parents?" Holmes asked, but something about the way he said it made her think that he already knew the answer.

"I lost them," Amy replied simply. Not wanting to linger on the topic, she quickly asked, "So you're just on your own, then?"

He heard the pity in her voice, and narrowed his eyes at her. "I don't mind the arrangement, for the vast majority of the time. People are idiots, and I find it tedious to bother with their slow minds."

"Um, _thanks_," she said sarcastically.

Was he for real? He was going to invite her back to his home and then insult her?

"Oh, don't be like that," he said dismissively, "It's not your fault you're stupid."

"Hey!" Amy said indignantly, forehead creasing in annoyance. "I am _not _stupid -"

"You are compared to me," Holmes said matter-of-factly, sipping his tea.

"You're so _arrogant_," she snapped, sinking down in her chair sulkily.

"So are you," he told her, his eyes taking on that sharp gleam they'd had when he'd deduced all those facts about her outside the pub. "You think that you're better than that boring old village you grew up in -"

"Leadworth," Amy supplied, against her better judgement. Before he could jump in with an insult, she said, "And it's not _that _bad there."

Holmes raised one eyebrow and took another innocent sip of his tea. "Really? The Scottish girl doesn't think the English village is that bad?"

She demurely raised her cup to her lips and took a deliberately slow sip, arching her eyebrows at him pointedly. At length she lowered the cup back to her lap and responded, "No, it's not that bad. I have Rory, and Mels. We have fun." Holmes looked vaguely interested, so she continued on, "Mels is my best mate. She's a bit wild, always getting herself in trouble… Back at school I was the only girl who got in more trouble than her, but she's advanced to law breaking now and taken the lead. Last weekend she broke into the school and got arrested; said that she'd left her note book behind, but I reckon she did it just for something to do. Rory agreed, he reckons she should get a job, but she said she'd hate to have to work all the time like he does. He's a nurse, and the hospital always gives him the worst shifts but he never complains. Rory's always been like that, always willing to do the hard jobs no one else wants to do. He's a really good guy, you know. Most blokes would have left if their girlfriend decided to be a kissogram…" She stopped abruptly when she realised that she'd started rambling. "Sorry, I'm probably boring you…"

"Not at all," Holmes told her politely. Only to follow it up with, "It's fascinating to hear how fond you are of your friends despite how desperate you still are to leave."

"Excuse me?" Amy asked, knowing full well that what he was going to say would probably insult her, but not being able to stop herself.

"You believe that you're destined for something bigger and better than what that place has to offer. Adventure, that's what you want. And you've been waiting for it for a long time," Holmes narrowed his eyes at her. "So why haven't you gone and had it yet?"

Amy swallowed and looked away from him, pursing her red lips and putting her tea down on the small table beside her chair. "Just haven't found the time," she lied.

"The boyfriend," Holmes suggested, also putting his tea down before steepling his hands beneath his chin, leaning forward to peer at her more closely.

Amy found herself feeling annoyed at the fact that he couldn't remember Rory's name – or just couldn't be bothered using it – despite the fact that she'd just been talking about him. She frowned at Holmes and told him, "I am not staying in Leadworth just for Rory."

"No, no, you were willing to stay with me for the night even though he made it obvious that he didn't want you to, and you didn't tell him you loved him too at the end of the phone call." Holmes was staring at her as though she were a lab experiment he was about to dissect. "You obviously have strong feelings for him, but you're not willing to admit it, which is damaging your relationship…"

"It is _not _damaging it!" Amy snapped, anger flaring up inside her. "Just because I'm not one hundred percent ready for something so serious -"

"Because you're waiting for something else," Holmes observed, seeming unfazed by her anger. "You don't want to make any commitments because you're convinced that something else is going to happen, and you want to be free and ready to leave at any moment. What could that something _be_?"

Amy shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable under his penetrating gaze. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and then let herself focus on a star shining brightly outside the window, wishing yet again that her Raggedy Man would come back for her. Holmes had deduced a lot of information about her, sure; but he'd never figure out that she'd had this vivid imaginary friend on his own, and there was no way she was going to tell him. She didn't want another person telling her she was crazy, and besides, he was clearly enjoying having a puzzle to try to solve.

"I'm not waiting for anything," she said, trying to keep her voice flat.

"Oh but you are," Holmes asserted, following her gaze out the window. When he looked back at her his eyes were twinkling like the stars in the night sky. "And it's not some_thing _you're waiting for – It's some_one_."

Amy inhaled sharply, refusing to look at him. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"They left you. _He _left you. It was a man, of course it was, you wouldn't have held onto it for this long otherwise. Sentimentality, such a weakness. Dark blue, that's _his _colour. It reminds you of him."

"Shut. Up," Amy growled, a low warning.

Holmes didn't take it, continuing on, "You keep trying to convince yourself that you've stopped waiting, because the rest of the world keeps telling you it's impossible – but you haven't stopped, not really. That's why you can't fully commit to your boyfriend. You still believe."

"Believe in what?" She challenged fiercely, levelling her green eyes right at him.

There was a considered pause, and then he said, "Fairy tales."

Amy's heart seemed to stutter and skip a beat, but she kept her expression blank and scoffed, "Fairy tales? I'm eighteen, I don't believe in fairy tales any more."

Holmes leant back in his chair, his eyebrows raised in challenge. His voice was completely level when he countered, "Amelia does."

That was too much for her to cope with. She gave him a deadly glare and stood straight up, hands clenched into fists at her sides. Who did he think he was to pry into her personal life? Sherlock Holmes, the great big _creep _who thought that he knew her after only a few hours… Well he _didn't_ know her, not at all. Because she was Amy, _damnit_, not Amelia, stupid seven year old Amelia Pond waiting in her garden for a hero who was never going to return –

"Shut up," she snarled. "Just shut up."

Holmes looked up at her placidly. "Have I offended you?"

"Yes," she huffed, feeling her Scottish temper flare. She continued to glare at him as she ranted on, "Who do you think you are, trying to figure out every little detail of everyone else's lives and prying into their personal business like it has anything to do with you? How do you think that feels, having this stranger get inside your most private thoughts and situations?"

"This coming from the girl who went through my belongings as soon as she was left alone in my apartment," he countered, languidly rising to stand opposite her. "As I recall, you weren't too worried about privacy when you were prying into my cocaine stash."

Amy faltered, "That – That was completely different!"

"How?" Holmes asked, defiant. "How is that different to me simply observing the things you put out there for the world to see? It's not my fault I'm the only one smart enough to pay attention to the details."

"But there are some things you should just keep to yourself!" She yelled, stamping one foot on the ground petulantly.

"I know what it feels like to have people tell you you're wrong when you know you're right, Amy." Holmes met her raging fire with cool ice, staring her down. "People are stupid, and people are cruel. They fear what they don't understand and they get threatened so easily, it's pathetic. I know what it's like to have no one believe something you know to be true."

The flame of anger that had sparked inside her dimmed, but she wasn't about to let him win the argument that easily. She stubbornly shook her head once, slowly, deliberately. "No. No, you wouldn't understand this. Mels and Rory, they go along with it – Sometimes I think Mels actually believes and isn't just making fun of me, but you wouldn't – you _couldn't _understand it."

"Once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true," Holmes stated.

Amy's eyes widened as she stared at him, finally unclenching her hands. "What?"

"If all the evidence suggests that the improbable is true, no matter how mad it seems, it must be," he told her, blue eyes focused on her green ones.

She spun away from him, pushing her red hair back off her forehead and throwing an arm out to the side despairingly. "No, trust me. It is impossible. You'll think I'm mad."

"There's something to be said for genius in insanity," she heard him say from behind her.

"I believe that," she said over her shoulder, "But you don't, do you?"

He smirked at her, an action that she found oddly calming. "No, I don't."

She smirked back, before turning suddenly serious. "Why did you follow me out the pub?"

"Because I wanted a smoke," Holmes replied.

He was definitely lying, Amy thought. There was no way that was just a coincidence. You couldn't have that much chemistry with someone and then _coincidentally _go for a smoke at the precise moment they left. No, he'd called out to her for a reason, and she was going to find out what that reason was.

"No, I don't believe you," Amy said, shaking her head. "Why did you _really _follow me?"

"Because you interest me," he told her, shrugging one shoulder. "And I wanted to know more."

"So you think I'm a -" she waved a hand in between them, searching for the right words. "I'm some sort of puzzle?"

"I think you don't make sense," Holmes said evenly. "You're a challenge. How could I resist?"

Amy Pond had been called a challenge many times, by many people, but no one had ever said it in such positive tones as Sherlock Holmes did right then. The way he said it wasn't tired, or mad, or at all as though he thought it was her fault. In fact, he didn't sound annoyed at all – He sounded positively thrilled.

"You think that's a good thing?" She asked hesitantly.

"I was bored before tonight," he responded.

"I've seen four psychiatrists," Amy suddenly blurted out, and then clapped a hand over her mouth, horrified.

Holmes actually chuckled. "You what?"

She meekly lowered her hand and repeated, "Aunt Sharon sent me to four psychiatrists when I was younger."

"Was the customary single mental health consultant not enough for you?" He teased.

Amy chewed her bottom lip. "I kept biting them."

His chuckle turned into a real, proper laugh at that, a lively sound that made Amy smile in spite of herself. He asked her, "Why did you bite them?"

Her smile dropped slightly as she remembered. "Because they said he wasn't real."

Holmes stopped laughing, but his smile remained in place as he said, "Amy Pond, I am far from bored now."

* * *

**a.n. **In case you couldn't guess, I am a HUGE Rory fan (The Ponds/Williamses are my OTP), but please review and let me know how keen you are for some Amy x Sherlock action! Any romance, will be as canon as possible (no sudden out of character sex demon Sherlock) but it is a possibility, if you guys are interested enough, so let me know. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed this chapter!


	4. Part One: Stars

**- Stars –**

The night was the perfect shade of dark blue. Almost the same hue as the police box that had crashed into her garden all those years ago, lit up by the dazzling city lights but still dark enough to let the stars shine through. Amy Pond lay on the hard road, staring up at the heavens and thinking about all of the wonderful things that were out there in space, just beyond her reach; all those experiences just waiting for her. If only she could get to them.

"You're being ridiculous," Holmes said disdainfully from his position on the curb.

"I am being _magnificent_," Amy replied grandly, turning her head to the side to look at him.

He was standing with his arms folded over his chest, looking very awkward and proper in his big coat and a red scarf, which didn't match his complexion nearly as well as the navy one Amy had taken from him and was wearing again now. He glared at her as though she were a child who was up well past her bed time and let out a long suffering sigh.

"That's one word to describe you," he said.

Amy stuck her tongue out at him and rolled her head back to look at the stars again. "Come on, you asked to hear my story."

"I asked to hear your story, yes," she heard him say, "I did not ask to lie on the road in the dark. Do you wish to be hit by a car?"

"There's no cars out at this hour," she countered, although she actually had no clue what the traffic was like in Holmes' neighbourhood. For all she knew his neighbours might enjoy midnight drives and would be returning to run her over at any minute. She decided to add, "We'll hear them coming before they get close enough to hit us, anyway."

She thought she heard Holmes scoff, and then there was the tap of his dress shoes against the bitumen and his feet were beside her head. She craned her neck to look up at him, looming over her, and laughed at his utterly bewildered expression.

His eyes flashed as he asked, "Do you know how unhygienic this is?"

"Very," Amy responded, her light tone letting him know that she didn't care in the slightest.

"If you get hit by a car -"

"You don't have to ride in the ambulance with me, you just have to wait for it to come," she joked, reaching up to tug on his pants leg. "And then they can pick me up off the floor and you can get back to your boring old life."

"Is this really necessary?" He asked, totally exasperated now.

"Just shut up and _lie down_." Amy rolled her eyes and patted the road beside her hip.

"It's cold," Holmes said pathetically, in what she could only assume was a desperate last effort to get her to move.

"No shit, Sherlock," she said sarcastically. "You're wearing a coat and a scarf, aren't you? You're all rugged up, so toughen up."

He was clearly not impressed with the idea – or the way she was speaking to him – but there was only a moment's pause before she saw his long legs bending, and then he was sitting on the road beside her, grimacing and looking for all the world like he'd rather be anywhere else. He couldn't resist a challenge, it seemed, even one as petty as this.

"Now what?" Holmes asked shortly, rubbing his hands together to get rid of the lose bits of gravel sticking to his palms.

"Now you _lie down_," Amy said condescendingly, "On your back. And you look up at the stars."

"But why -"

"Shush!" She held up a hand to silence his protests. "Just do it."

Muttering and grumbling to himself the entire time, Holmes shuffled forward and stiffly lay back on the road. Another win to Amy, she mentally ticked off. She was having a good night.

He turned his head to glare at her and asked, "And?"

"And what?" She asked innocently, giving him her most flirtatious smile.

His icy blue eyes were stunning against the dark backdrop, Amy thought, and with the red of his scarf he made a striking contrast to the rest of the dark world surrounding them. He really was quite handsome, with those high cheekbones and soft lips…

"I'm lying in the middle of the road in the middle of the night, for what?"

"Can't you appreciate the beauty?" Amy asked, holding her arms up in front of her to gesture grandly at the sky. "Just look at it. Look at everything that's out there, whole worlds and solar systems and… and it's amazing, don't you think?"

Holmes scoffed, "There's enough on Earth to interest me. Until they find intelligent life on another planet I refuse to devote any of my memory space to it."

"But it _is_ _space_," she insisted, dropping one arm but using the other to point to a large star. "It's the entire universe! Look at that one, how it glows. It's breathtaking."

"It's stupid," he said dismissively. "Balls of gas and lumps of rock orbiting each other. Boring."

"But the beginning of life is out there, and probably the end, too. You can't say that's boring!"

"I can, because it is."

She slapped him across the chest. "You're just making fun of me now."

"Why would me thinking space is boring be an insult to you?" He cocked an eyebrow at her, looking engaged for the first time since she'd brought him outside.

Ah, she was getting ahead of herself; of course he didn't know about the raggedy man who fell out of the sky. Holmes was clever and had already deduced as much as he could about her, but the thing he wanted to know most was classed as impossible, so he wouldn't figure it out, and if she told him her story he'd dismiss it immediately. It would be more fun to watch him struggle, just for a little while. Not that Amy was vindictive, but if Holmes wanted a puzzle then she'd be her most puzzling self.

"You're the great consulting detective, why don't you figure it out?" She challenged with a smirk, knowing that he wouldn't be able to resist.

Holmes frowned at her and stated cryptically, "The stars."

"Are beautiful." She pursed her lips at him in a coquettish smile and rolled over to lie on her stomach, her side pressed up against him and her face hovering just above the small sliver of his collarbone exposed between the folds of his scarf.

He stared up at her, his expression completely, infuriatingly unreadable, but when she wiggled a tiny bit more into the side of his coat his bottom lip dropped slightly, as though he was surprised.

"What are you -" He began to ask, but she cut him off.

"Go on," she teased, lifting a hand and slowly pulling his scarf down to cover the exposed bit of his shoulder, making sure that her fingertips traced across his skin before the fabric covered the gap. "Figure me out."

She could see his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed. She was making him nervous, and she loved it.

"I have you breathing down my neck," he said, and while she didn't doubt that he'd meant to say it cuttingly, it instead came out in a bit of a gasp. His eyes flashed and he continued in his normal unimpressed baritone, "I don't know what you could possibly expect under this condition."

"I expect you to show me why you think you're so brilliant," Amy replied nonchalantly, but she rolled off his shoulder and onto her back once again anyway. "I know that you've been making deductions since I brought you out here, you might as well just tell me what they are."

It only took about twenty seconds, Amy reckoned, before he turned his head to look up at the sky and said, "The stars, the night sky, they hold a special significance for you and the man who left you, obviously. He lives somewhere that's not within easy visiting distancing, most likely overseas. He had to return home, but you parted amicably, with the belief that he'll return. You were young, and he was older than you; you look up to him. He's not the first person to have left you, but his is the only departure you can't come to terms with._Why_?"

Amy found that, for some reason, she couldn't reply. She didn't want to think about the answer to that question. Why couldn't she let it go? Why was she still wrapped in the fantasy of her Raggedy Doctor? Her own voice echoed in her head, _because if he isn't real, you have nothing to look forward to and no way out. _She picked the brightest star she could see and focused on it, refusing even to blink until her eyes began to water. A small tear drop formed along her bottom lid and rolled from the corner of her eye down her cheek, splashing onto her ear uncomfortably.

Holmes must have noticed it, as he said testily, "Please do try not to get so emotional."

"I'm not being emotional," she snapped back, lifting an arm to hurriedly wipe the moisture away on her sleeve. She _wasn't _crying, her eyes were just watering. That was all. Completely different. Completely valid. She tried to level her voice to a practiced pitch of indifference as she added, "Emotions get in the way."

He turned his head ever so slightly to glance at her out of the corner of his eye and murmured, "Indeed."

Amy inhaled the brisk night air and held it for a second before exhaling a big gust and saying, "And you were wrong, by the way."

"How so?" Holmes propped himself up on his elbows and looked down his nose at her.

"I have come to terms with it. I know that it was just a story I made up."

"You haven't," Holmes disputed. "And it's obvious that, to you at least, it isn't made up. You wouldn't have dragged me out here if you didn't want someone knowing about it. You still want to talk about him, but this way you can tell yourself that you're bringing him back up for me, not for yourself."

Amy turned to look at him, and found that he was already searching her face for any clues it could give him. For a few moments she just stared straight back at him, her eyes wide, before running her tongue over her lips and sighing, "It's just a story. An imaginary friend I made up, that's all. He just… It seemed so _real_, you know? The shed _was _smashed, and the crack in my wall _did_ disappear. And I – I _feel _like it was real. Like _he _was real." She huffed out a laugh and said, "But that's crazy. I'm crazy."

"That remains to be seen," Holmes responded.

She laughed again, though no more genuinely than the last time, and decided that she might as well just tell him the whole story. If he thought her mad, well, he wouldn't be the first. And it wasn't like she'd ever have to see him again anyway. It was already midnight, so there'd be six more awkward hours and then she could catch the train back to Leadworth and Rory. Good old reliable, always there Rory. Amy had nothing to lose by telling Holmes her story.

She focused her gaze on the stars and began, "When I was seven, there was a crack in my bedroom wall. Aunt Sharon said it was a normal crack, but it definitely wasn't, because through it I could hear voices."

"The mentally unstable diagnoses is looking favourable," Holmes said snarkily.

Amy sat up and whacked him upside the head. "You said you'd try to understand!"

"I _am_," he whined, rubbing the back of his head and pouting at her.

"Certainly doesn't sound like it," she snapped, nostrils flaring.

"Okay, fine, I'll be quiet," he said placatingly, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

She gave him a warning look, crossed her legs in front of her, and continued on, "I wasn't scared of anything, because I was on my own pretty much all the time, so not much fazed me. But this crack… The crack scared me. So I wished for someone to come fix it. And then a blue box fell out of the sky into my backyard, smashing my garden shed."

Holmes took advantage of her pause to ask, "What do you mean by 'blue box'?"

"Shut up and let me get on with the story, I'm getting to that bit!" Amy glowered, effectively silencing him. "So I went outside to see what the hell this box was, right? It's lying in the yard, smoke billowing out, and it has the words Police Call Box written on it, so I immediately know that it's here to fix the crack. And then a man jumps out of it, a man in a raggedy suit, who called himself the Doctor."

"So it was a large box, then," Holmes muttered in a tone bordering on sarcastic.

Ignoring him, Amy continued, "He was… glowing. Yellow. Like the stars. He looked like a normal guy, once he stopped glowing, but he wasn't like anyone else I've ever met. He opened up the crack in my wall, and there was a giant eyeball staring back at us – Prisoner Zero has escaped, it kept saying, over and over. And then the crack closed, and the Raggedy Doctor hurried back down to the police box, because it had started making these weird noises and he said he had to take it on a quick trip. I asked if I could go with him, and he promised he'd be back in five minutes."

"And it's been eleven years," Holmes finished, sounding almost sympathetic. "And you're still waiting.

Amy nodded sadly, looking not at the stars but at the black, uneven ground beneath her. "I just wish… I dunno. I wish he'd come back."

"Well, you certainly have an overactive imagination," Holmes said snidely, standing up abruptly. "If I wasn't convinced you're not a dangerous kind of mentally unstable I wouldn't want you staying in my house."

"_What?_" Amy shot up so quickly she grazed her left knee, but her anger was clouding all her other senses too much for her to even notice, let alone care.

"You said it yourself," he said, totally blasé. "It's crazy. A police call box falls out of the sky, a man appears out of it and makes a crack in your wall – through which there is a giant eyeball – disappear, and then he just vanishes into thin air? _That's _your story?"

Amy drew herself up to her full height, trying her best to look imposing even though she felt smaller than she had in years. "You don't have to be so mean about it."

"Emotions get in the way, Amy."

He turned and started walking back towards the front door of his flat, his coat flapping in the cold breeze that was just starting to pick up. She stood frozen in the middle of the road, watching him walk away, her anger slowly but surely being replaced by the much more unpleasant feeling of disappointment. It was only when he had the door open and one foot inside that he turned back to see if she was following. She couldn't imagine what she looked like, wearing a police woman outfit and one of his navy coats, which was far too large and hung over her shoulders and down to her ankles, with her red hair whipping in front of her face and her bottom lip drawn up by her top teeth in an attempt to stop it wobbling.

"Are you coming?" He asked, sounding as though he was sick of her wasting his time.

Well, she wouldn't be wasting anymore of it.

"No," she stated firmly, shrugging the coat off one shoulder and then the other. She held it out to him but didn't move forward. "Here."

"What are you doing?" He sighed, tilting his head slightly to the side.

"I'm giving you back your coat, hurry up and take it." And _she _was the slow one, geez.

He stepped back out onto the street and said, "Amy, come inside."

"No," she repeated, shaking her head. "No, I'm not coming inside. You asked to hear my story, you said that you knew what it was like to believe something no one else does, and then you – you _make fun of me_!"

"And _you _said that you're crazy," he pointed out, his voice flat and calm. His eyes, however, were narrowed in concern. "Can we discuss this inside, where it's not freezing cold?"

"_No!" _She yelled, throwing the coat at him so he had to fumble to catch it. "You obviously don't want me here. So I'm going."

Holmes didn't deny her claim, she noticed, instead choosing to question, "Where are you going to go?"

She hadn't thought about that. "Uh, a hostel," she said before she could panic about it too much. "I have enough money for the night, I'll just get a cab to a hostel and stay there."

"Your wallet's inside," he informed her, and she caught the smirk that lifted the corners of his lips.

Oh, Amy wanted to smack that smirk right off his stupid face… But he did have a point. If she was going to get anywhere she needed that wallet, which was indeed inside, in his lounge. She reluctantly admitted to herself that he had her stuck now.

"Well I'll just go get it and then I will be on my way," she said, as though that had been her plan all along. She marched across the road and up to the front door purposefully, with her chin lifted and her shoulders back. "So if you'll excuse me -"

Holmes didn't budge though, instead stepping back to block the doorway. "I can't let you do that."

She sighed exasperatedly and pushed her hair back off her forehead. "What am I meant to do without my purse, Holmes? I just need to grab it and then I'll be on my way and you'll never have to see me again -" She tried to push past him, but he refused to move. She threw all her weight against his chest, but he didn't even stumble. "Would you please just let me in?!"

"I mean I can't let you go," he clarified, looking down at her earnestly.

She immediately stopped trying to push him aside, and just stood pressed against his chest. But then she came to her senses and stepped back, blinked and asked, "What do you mean you can't let me go? You think I'm mad."

"I think you're intriguing," he corrected – or maybe just added, she wasn't sure. "And I can't let you go wandering off around London on your own at night."

Amy bristled up again at that, because he was making her feel like a child. "I can do what I want," she growled. "And I want to get away from here, so let me get my purse and go."

"I'm not going to let you do that," Holmes said sternly.

"You can't tell me what I can and can't do," she said feistily, and with a swell of recklessness she spun around and started walking down the street. "And if you're not going to let me get my wallet then I'll just leave."

"Amy," he said, and she heard him following her. "Stop being idiotic."

"Oh, am I being idiotic again? I'm sorry, I can't help it; I'm just such an idiot, being stupid is my natural state," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

She heard him scoff, "You know that this is stupid. You have no money, nowhere to go…"

"I'd have money, if _you _had let me get my purse," she retorted, shooting him a glare over her shoulder.

And then she felt his fingers curl around her wrist, and she was yanked backwards. Oh, so he was going to actually hold her captive now?

"Stop," he commanded.

"Let me go." She tried to pull her hand free, but he didn't loosen his grip.

"Come back inside," he said, his voice as close to pleading as she suspected it had ever been. "You don't have to talk to me again, but I will not have any harm come to you. I can't let you go, not with a clear conscience."

"I didn't know you had a conscience," Amy said cuttingly.

His icy blue eyes bore into her, and when he spoke his words were soft and surprisingly sad, "I am human, Amy."

Rather than allowing herself to be drawn in to his sad eyes, she took advantage of his momentary distraction to propel herself backwards over the gutter and into the road, with enough speed and force to make his hand instinctively release its grip. She only had a split second to celebrate her – admittedly small and pathetic – win, though, before a pair of headlights came zooming around the corner and blinded her. She threw her arms up in front of her face as she tried to run out of the path of the oncoming car, but the toe of her shoe caught on a loose stone and sent her off balance.

Oh god, she was going to fall and be hit by a car. This was how she was going to die, not on a wild adventure in a far off place, but in a dark London street, wearing a kissogram cop outfit. Fate was surprisingly cruel.

But then, just as the ground came flying up to meet her and the blaring of the car's horn filled her ears at an unbearable volume, she felt something forceful grab her waist, and she was being lifted up and propelled sideways. Her head hit the ground with an awful smack, making stars dance before her eyes. She had just enough sense to tuck her legs up as the car sped past, centimetres from where her feet were dangling over the side of the road, and then it was gone and the street was quiet once again.

As her senses slowly returned and the blinking lights flashing in front of her eyes began to fade, she realised that her face was pressed against something soft and woollen – Holmes's scarf. He was lying half on top of her, their legs entangled and his arms wrapped securely around her waist. She could feel his heartbeat against her chest, not much slower than her own, which she was sure he'd be able to feel racing. She craned her neck to look up at him, and he shifted one arm to prop himself up above her.

"Are you alright?" He asked, barely out of breath.

Amy was stunned. He'd saved her life. She had been about to die, and Sherlock Holmes had thrown himself in the path of a speeding car to save her.

She lifted her head and kissed him, breathless and exhilarated and full of adrenaline. He tensed against her, but when she ran her tongue over his lips they parted and she wrapped her hands around the back of his neck, pulling him down to her and deepening the kiss. Again, his hands didn't move, but the kiss was skilful and sent a shiver down Amy's spine.

"You're shaking," Holmes stated, finally wrenching himself away. His eyes scanned over her, and she noticed that they lingered for a moment over her legs, where her skirt had ridden right up her thighs.

Amy looked up at the dark man, who still such a stranger to her, through half-lidded eyes. The light from the stars was making the edges of his curls glow, and she felt herself to longing to run her fingers through his hair and kiss him again and again. She lowered her lashes and said longingly, "Take me inside."

* * *

**a.n. **here you go, a nice new update for you all! unfortunately it'll probably be a few weeks before the next one, because I have exams now. blergh. I know, I hate it too. BUT when the next chapter does come, as you can tell from the end of this one, it will be a fun one. :D Reviews will inspire me to write faster, though, so please let me know what you think of the story so far and where you want it to go from here!


	5. Part One: Touch

**- Touch –**

They were barely across the landing when Amy pushed herself flush against him, forcing his back against the wall. She kicked the door shut with her heel and looped her arms around his neck in one swift movement, pulling him down to her height and kissing him with a ferocity that startled even herself. What was most surprising of all, however, was the fact that Holmes was kissing her back - passionately. Sure, it had taken him a few seconds to respond, and he still hadn't put his hands on her yet – from the movements she could feel his shoulders making she guessed his arms were pin-wheeling awkwardly out to the side – but his tongue was dancing around hers with a skill that was utterly delicious. When he gently drew her bottom lip up between his teeth before drawing back, she couldn't help but moan; whether from pleasure at the kiss or disappointment at the sudden lack of contact, she wasn't sure.

"Amy…" Holmes tried to say something, bringing his hands up to her collarbones and applying light pressure, as though he was thinking about pushing her away. The touch could just as easily have been interpreted as an invitation, however, and now that he'd ignited a fire at her core he wasn't getting away until he'd satisfied it.

She silenced him by kissing him once again on the lips, but it was chaste this time, with their mouths closed and no battle for dominance. As they kissed, her hands slid up to rest on top of his own, her fingers sliding into the spaces between his. She pulled back to look at him imploringly, holding his gaze with a smouldering stare as she slowly guided his hands down over the small curves of her breasts. She watched his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed thickly, his blue eyes bulging as they stared down at his hands and her chest beneath them.

And then he recoiled suddenly, wrenching his hands away and pressing himself back against the wall. She noted that even in his panic his movements were the epitome of purposeful, long lines that were so graceful – the exact opposite of Rory's adorable clumsiness. Amy took a deep breath, and in her moment of distraction Holmes began to edge sideways, his eyes darting around the room as he stuttered, "Amy, really, this isn't a good idea -"

"I think it's a great idea," she growled, pushing Rory out of her mind and grabbing Holmes' collar, forcing him to turn back to her.

She began unbuttoning his shirt, her fingers dancing along the bare skin of his chest as she exposed it, until he reached up and gripped her firmly around the wrists.

"Amy," he repeated her name yet again, but it was so dark and serious, not a throaty moan like she was longing for. "No. We can't."

Even with his fingers encircling her bony wrists she resisted his attempts to stop her, tilting her head down and exhaling a warm breath against the crook of his neck as she asked coyly, "Why not?"

She was rewarded with a shudder that made him involuntarily buck his hips against hers, and her lips spread in a smug smile, her eyebrows rising suggestively.

"Because it's a bad idea," he managed to reply, but his voice hitched on the last word and she knew that his refusal wasn't going to last much longer.

"Sherlock Holmes," she said, drawing his name out and accentuating the roll of the r, the click of the k and the plump of her lips as they came together on the m, "You want this."

To prove her point she thrust her hips forward, grinding against him – and felt the pressure of his erection against her thigh. He didn't bother denying it that time, instead letting a shaky breath escape as his hips bucked forward and his grip around her wrists tightened reflexively.

"I shouldn't," he insisted even as he pulled her closer, fingers wound so tightly around her wrists that they were bruising. "We shouldn't."

"Why not?" Amy asked again, looking up at him through her lashes, suddenly all doe-eyed innocence.

Holmes closed his eyes and turned his head to the side, probably trying to concentrate on coming up with excuses.

"Because – Because we barely know each other."

"I'm not asking you to marry me."

He still wouldn't look at her, so she leant forward and planted a kiss on the exposed side of his neck, sucking gently.

"No – Amy -" She could feel the words as he spoke them, and smiled against his skin. "What about Rory?"

For a second her blood ran cold. Rory's face flashed again before her eyes, so trusting and forgiving, and she was stepping back from Holmes without really realising what she was doing. Her eyes darted across her feet and up to the angular face of the man in front of her, the man who had taken her in when she had nowhere else to go, who had saved her life. The man who kissed like a god. She decided that what Rory didn't know wouldn't hurt him, no?

"He's all the way in Leadworth," she answered with renewed fire, taking advantage of the fact that Holmes had let go of her wrists to quickly unzip his fly.

He tried to swat her hands away, finally managing to side-step her and back into the lounge area. His cheeks were flushed, his clothes in various states of disarray, and his eyes kept slipping away from her face and down to where her skirt had ridden up her thighs.

"But aren't you supposed to have some sort of moral obligation, a sort of monogamous code -"

Holmes ran into the armchair and fell back into the seat, forcing his escape to come to a halt. Amy stalked forward, her eyes dark with lust, and put one hand on either arm of the chair, pinning him there.

"I'm a kissogram; not really one for moral obligations," she said, echoing a line he'd said to her on the street when she'd missed her train, and her voice was low and breathy as she straddled him like she had at the bar all those hours ago. "Happy Birthday, Holmes."

She was slow, this time. Seductive in everything she did, the epitome of feminine grace as she tilted her head, let her eyelids flutter shut, lowered her lips to his and applied the lightest pressure. She lingered, not pushing for more, just remaining in the kiss and savouring its softness. Because she was a kissogram, and it was her job to figure out what kind of kiss people craved – and _this _was what Sherlock Holmes liked. Intimacy.

* * *

**a.n. **So I'm going to be horrible and stop it there, because I've got terrible writer's block and I'm feeling a bit insecure. Here's the deal. This is like a sneak peek of the chapter. I'm posting it because I NEED YOUR OPINIONS BEFORE I CAN POST THE REST. _Do you want Pondlock smut?_ Because it's all written up and ready to post, but I don't know if you think that's too out of character for Sherlock... Because this story is and will remain canon-compliant (in terms of Sherlock living with John & Amy travelling with the Doctor in later chapters, etc.) So PLEASE REVIEW, tell me what you want, and I'll put the next chapter up as soon as I've got a good consensus. Fair deal? Thank you for reading, you're all amazing, and I'm kinda putting this next chapter in your hands.


	6. Part One: Touch ii

**- Touch –**

…

He could have stayed inside at the party and let her walk away from the pub without a word. She could have caught the train back to Leadworth, and they would have never seen each other again. He could have got a cab back to his place on his own and left her alone at the restaurant. She could have called Rory and apologised and asked him to please come get her, she wanted to come home. He could have kicked her out when she found his cocaine, or she could have left. He could have let her storm off in a huff when he insulted her, not chased after her. She could have ran off, as fast as her long legs could carry her, screaming for help.

But they hadn't.

They had continued their game of cat and mouse, taunting and teasing and challenging, laying bait and waiting for the other to bite. Playing on weaknesses and revelling in the satisfaction of every minor victory, but never able to quit while ahead. Because they had _chemistry, _and it was_ explosive._

She knew she had him when she felt his hands curl around her hips. The touch, when it finally came, was not at all tentative, as she had expected his grip to be, but secure, strong and certain as he pulled her down and forward, closer to him. And just like that, Amy Pond had beaten Sherlock Holmes – again.

His lips parted and his tongue demanded entrance to her mouth, and she gladly granted it. They kissed ferociously, tasting of tea and tobacco and unrestrained lust. Their hands roamed, Amy's running along Holmes' broad shoulders, pushing his shirt off to reveal toned muscles that tensed beneath her touch. Holmes ran his hands up her sides and into her hair, bunching the soft, red strands between his fingers and tugging ever so gently until her head was tilted back and her throat exposed. With a predatory glint in his eye he leant forward to nip at the base of her neck, coaxing a delighted hum from the back of Amy's throat. As his mouth moved along her collarbone she wound her hands into his dark curls, and the sensation of her polished nails scraping lightly along his scalp sent Holmes spiralling to the point where denying her contact would have proved impossible.

This was wrong, a part of Amy knew, but that knowledge didn't stop her from whipping her head forward and capturing his lips with hers again, sucking firmly on his tongue and delighting in the heat flooding her body – because it just felt so fucking _good_.

"I knew you wanted this," she growled against Holmes' lips as her own curled up in a smirk.

He didn't answer, continuing to silently kiss along her jawline until he got to her earlobe, which he tugged gently down with his teeth. She groaned as the action sent shivers up her spine, rolling her head back and letting her eyes flutter shut. When she felt his hands sliding up her thighs, however, her eyes flew open. He was massaging gently, fingers running in circles against the soft skin of her inner thigh, getting closer and closer and -

He stopped suddenly and leant back in the armchair, and Amy felt an ache at the loss of contact. She looked down at him, flushed and breathing heavily, eyebrows raised questioningly.

"Are you okay?" She asked breathlessly, searching him for any signs of distress.

His blue eyes were slightly glazed, and it was an odd sight to see on the man who usually appeared so composed. He rubbed his hands against the top of the arms of the chair, ran his tongue across his lips and swallowed before answering, "Protection."

"What?" Tactlessly, Amy spoke before she'd given herself a chance to process what she'd heard. Thankfully she understood before Holmes could speak again, hurriedly amending, "_Oh! _Protection, of course, yeah…"

Well. Amy was never one to be caught unprepared, but she was grateful that Holmes had remembered, because she had been getting quite caught up in the moment. Ignoring how shaky she felt, she swung her leg over Holmes' lap and darted off to her wallet, perched on top of a low pile of books beside the couch. She bent forward to search through it, fumbling through lip glosses and crumpled up receipts, until finally she found a condom in a side pocket. She straightened up and spun around, holding it up between two fingers as she did so.

"All sorted," she said with a smile, which only spread when she saw that Holmes was standing, shirtless, in the middle of the room. She took a moment to admire his slim physique, and as she did so he walked towards her, eyes ice blue and piercing.

He stopped right in front of her, and for a moment he seemed hesitant to touch her again. Amy tucked the condom into the pocket of her dress and slowly reached out to him, skimming her fingertips along his smooth, hard abdomen, climbing up to his ribcage and coming to rest on his shoulders. He snaked his hands around her waist, pulling her forward, and in seconds they went from barely any contact to being pressed flat together, her arms wound around his neck and his hands moving up and down her spine. She inhaled sharply as he hit a tender spot on her back and jumped forward into him, curving her spine away from the pressure of his touch as pain cut through the haze of pleasure.

When she reopened her eyes she found herself under a scrutinising gaze, and before she could protest Sherlock was spinning her around so that her back was to him, and then suddenly her police vest was on the floor and her white shirt was being pushed up her back.

"You've injured yourself," Holmes stated, and Amy felt a feather-light touch near the base of her spine, fingertips fluttering around the edges of what felt like a big bruise.

"From earlier, when you pushed me out of the way of the car," she mused.

This earned a scoff from the consulting detective, and a derisive, "Obviously. Unless you've been doing any other rough activities that involve you lying on your back -"

"Oi, shut up!" Amy wrenched her shirt down and spun around instantly, shooting daggers at him. Her expression softened, however, when she saw that Holmes wasn't smirking at her, but instead looked almost apologetic.

"I'm -" He began to speak, but then stopped to clear his throat, looking utterly lost and slightly disgusted with himself. For a few seconds his mouth worked silently as he tried to articulate what he wanted to say, but eventually he just repeated the fact, "You're hurt. You should ice that."

"I'm fine," Amy insisted, clutching desperately at the few remaining shreds of intimacy hanging in the air between them, because, _damn it, _she still wanted him. _Badly. _"Really, I am." Holmes still looked dubious, so she added in a sultry voice, "Why don't you help take my mind off it?"

"If it's not bothering you why would you need me to distract you from it?"

Wondering how he could be such a stupid, clueless, male, Amy rolled her eyes and sarcastically inquired, "You _have _done it before, haven't you?"

Holmes quirked a brow. "Done what?"

Amy felt as though a bucket of cold water had just been poured over her head. "Oh, my god," she breathed, stepping back without realising what she was doing. "You're a – Oh, god. That's why you kept saying no, that's – I'm so sorry..."

"What are you talking abou-" She watched his eyes flash once, and then Holmes' face become a perfectly impassive mask as he realised what it was she was saying. There was a heavy silence that hung in the air, almost stifling in its awkwardness, and –oh, _ow_ - now that she'd noticed it Amy's entire body was aching. "You think I -"

"It's not a bad thing!" Amy blurted out, feeling the need to rectify her admittedly horrified reaction. "Really, it's no big deal, I just wasn't expecting it, I thought you, you know, being as old as you are and so good looking, I thought…" Her words, all completely honest and well-intentioned, trailed off under his withering stare.

"There's no need," Holmes said sharply, turning and sweeping into the kitchen.

Amy remained in the lounge, her cheeks flushed and her bottom lip trembling slightly with embarrassment and the after effects of faded arousal. She stared at the space Holmes had occupied seconds before and silently berated herself for being such a big-mouthed, stupid little girl.

"Here, put this against your back."

It was Holmes, holding a white tea-towel in his right hand. From the bag poking out one end of the folded towel, she could see that a bag of frozen peas was wrapped inside it. Humbled, she stepped forward and took the bag from him, trying her very best to muster a grateful smile and ignore the fact that he was still shirtless.

"Thanks," she mumbled as she took the cold package and awkwardly pressed it to her spine.

She flinched from the cold, and instantly Holmes' hands were overlapping her own, taking the home-made ice-pack from her and holding it at a much more effective angle over the bruise as he guided her to the two-person couch pushed up against the far wall. Baffled by his sudden gentle caring, Amy allowed herself to sink down into the cushions, noting how his right hand kept the ice-pack steady against her spine the entire time. They sat in silence, her eyes fixed on the stars visible through the window, until eventually she couldn't stand the unease and twisted around to look at him.

"I'm really sorry -" She began, but then his hand was on her shoulder, forcing her to turn away again.

His voice was flat when he explained, "It's better for you to face that way. You'll heal faster."

"Thank you, Doctor Holmes," she replied, trying to sound bright. He didn't respond, and so she tried to apologise again, "About before, I -"

"There's no need, Amy," he cut her off brusquely. A pause, and then, softer, "It's a common misconception."

"Misconception?" She hedged carefully.

She heard him sigh, and then the cold of the ice-pack disappeared. She twisted around to see him laying it on the arm of the couch, his expression blank.

"You should put that back on in ten minutes," he instructed, not quite meeting her gaze.

He went to stand up, but Amy grabbed for his hands and held him in place. He blinked at her, clearly startled by the sudden contact, and she forced herself to say the words while she had him stunned into a moment of silence. "Thank you. And I'm sorry, I really am, Sherlock. I shouldn't have been so persistent before, it's just, I mean, you invited me to stay the night and you just saved my life, and you're so bloody attractive -"

"That's the second time you've mentioned my physical attractiveness; should I put my shirt back on?" Holmes inquired dryly.

She rolled her eyes, the smallest of smiles tugging her lips up, and then she elaborated, "No, that's not what I mean. Well, okay, yeah, it kinda is, but it's not just that." Oh, why was she so getting so flustered? "You're attractive because you're _different. _You're so smart, and you don't care what other people think about you. You just see the world differently, yeah? And I – I see the world differently, too."

She searched his face for a reaction, and was rewarded after a few moments with a hand slowly, cautiously, rising to lift her chin, two of Holmes' fingers coming to rest against the pulse beating steadily in her neck.

"By that definition, you're quite attractive, too, Amy Pond," he finally responded.

"Only by that definition?" She teased, letting her flirtiness return.

The corners of his lips twitched up in a smirk, and Amy was certain that he was going to insult her again. But then he moved his hand back to cradle her head as his mouth moved forward to kiss right atop her pulse. Before she could even properly register the kiss he'd lifted her hands up to his lips and kissed each pulse at her wrists, too – each one gentle, delicate, appreciative.

She wanted to ask what he was doing but found that her mouth had gone dry. So when he returned her hands to her lap and sat back on the couch, Amy merely unabashedly stared at him until a few minutes later, when he made a soft noise of remembrance and grabbed the ice-pack off the arm of the couch.

"You should reapply this," Holmes said, holding it out towards her.

And suddenly she was reanimated. She slowly, deliberately seductively, began unbuttoning her white shirt to reveal the black bra underneath. She decided to throw in a double entendre for fun, saying in a slightly husky voice, "Wouldn't direct contact be better?"

His eyes were instantly devouring her, watching every miniscule movement of her fingers with an intensity that brought a flood of heat back into her cheeks. Once the shirt was fully unbuttoned, Amy ran her hands up her naval, skimming across her breasts and pushing it off her shoulders, pulling it slowly off each arm. She had time to bat her eyelashes at him only once, and then he was kissing her, running his hands and his lips all over her newly exposed skin, exploring every inch of her, mentally cataloguing every reaction she made to each individual touch. He unhooked her bra with ease, massaging her breasts with just the right amount of pressure as she captured his mouth with hers in a desperate, panting kiss.

She pushed against him as he tried to get her to lie down, the two of them still battling for dominance even as their hormones screamed at them. Amy perched herself on Holmes' lap, her calves folded back underneath her thighs, and splayed her palms against his chest. His hands cupped her arse as she began to slowly grind against his erection, still constrained by his trousers, his fingers clenching and unclenching in time with her movements. They held eye contact, staring at each other as though willing the other to make the next move. It was Holmes who did it. He lifted his leg up slightly - just enough to hit _the spot _– and suddenly Amy's eyes were squeezed shut, her hips moving not with practiced grace but with an urgent need, now, grinding against him through the thin material separating them as the fire built in her core. As she began to lose herself in the sensational friction between her legs, throwing her head back in delight, Holmes abruptly stood, his hands still beneath her. Her eyes flew open and she promptly curled her legs around his waist to keep herself up as he began staggering towards his bedroom.

They didn't make it that far.

Amy needed him, _now_, and she couldn't resist squirming in his arms, trying desperately to get as much contact as possible. Her shifting weight made him swerve into the hall wall, and she gasped in surprise and pleasure as she fell directly into his hand. Seemingly instinctually, his fingers began to move in slow, debilitating circles against the cloth of her knickers, expertly drawing primal moans from the back of her throat. One of her shoes fell off her foot as her leg spasmed, and she stifled a scream by biting his collarbone.

The move stilled his hand for a moment, and she reached down to unzip his fly – again – her long fingers fumbling around the button on his trousers before she finally got it undone. Even more awkwardly than before, with his trousers slowly falling down his legs, Holmes stumbled with her in his arms down the hallway and into his bedroom.

Amy kicked her remaining shoe off just outside the door, continuously kissing Holmes' shoulders and neck and jawline as he carried her over to his bed. They collapsed onto the soft mattress and she stretched out beneath him, licking her lips as she watched him straighten up and slip off his own shoes. She sat up and tugged his trousers down to his ankles, but when she moved to do the same with his pants he gently took her hand in his and shook his head.

Taking the cue, Amy sank back onto the bed and allowed him to reach up and slowly roll her stockings down her legs before running his fingers back up the inside of her thighs. He slid her knickers down over her knees, leaving her completely exposed and wanting. His eyes roamed over her, glancing up to meet her gaze, and she saw the hunger in them. She lifted her leg and slid her undergarments off completely, arching her back in a clear invitation that he couldn't ignore. He traced his fingertips up the inside of her thigh, scraped them through her neatly trimmed curls, dragged them torturously slowly along her folds, and then, just when she was beginning to whimper, he slipped one finger carefully inside and pulled a satisfied moan from the back of her throat. His fingers moved so gracefully inside her that every little touch sent ripples of pleasure rolling up her body, and she wasn't surprised when she spotted a violin sitting in its open case in the corner of the room behind Holmes; he was that skilled with his fingers, of course he was a musician. She lifted her hips and pointed her toes, signalling for him to come closer, to go deeper, to give her _more _than his fingers, but if he noticed - of course he noticed, Holmes noticed everything – he ignored it, continuing to move his fingers in careful ministrations that were bringing her closer and closer to the edge.

Just as the knot that Holmes was tying in her core got to the point of being unbearable, just when she was certain that she was about to unravel around him – He stopped. Amy groaned with frustration, biting her bottom lip and throwing herself forward on the bed. She propped herself up on her elbows and watched as he took off his pants. Eager for more, she grabbed the condom out of her pocket and then wiggled out of her hitched up skirt, the only piece of clothing she had left on.

And there they were, Sherlock Holmes and Amy Pond, stark naked and gorgeous as ever.

Amy practically lunged for him, propelling herself forward to grip his shoulders and pull him down on top of her. Holmes met her lips with a crash, a bruising kiss that felt more like pleasure than pain under the circumstances. Her nails clawed at his back and his breath was hot against her skin, his hands winding around her ribs but still avoiding the bruise that had bloomed on her spine. She bit his chest, purple marks flowering beneath her teeth as she tried to muffle her own moans. With a strength that Holmes hadn't been expecting, Amy flipped them over so that she was perched on top of his stomach, her red hair tumbling down around her shoulders and her fingers resting on his pecs.

She grabbed the condom from where she'd flung it onto the bedside table and ripped it open with her teeth. She gave him a flirty smile before sliding backwards, rolling lightly over the top of him so that he could feel the heat radiating from within her. She unrolled the latex sheath over his tip and down his shaft carefully, gripping him tightly in the palm of her hand and massaging as she did so. His hands knotted around the sheets as she gave a light squeeze, and when he felt her warm breath encapsulating him entirely he clenched the soft fabric so tightly it was at risk of ripping. She ran her tongue down the length of him, planting a kiss at the base of the shaft and then working her way back up to the tip, which she flicked lightly with her tongue. He made a strange, strangled sort of noise at that, and felt the warm exhale of her breath as she laughed. Her lips closed around him once again and she began to move her head, sliding up and down in an ecstatic pattern, all the while flicking her tongue against his most sensitive spots until he felt the glorious release building in the pit of his stomach. He opened his mouth to warn her, tried to tell her to stop, to wait, to _no, don't stop, keep going, do not stop - _But what came out instead of any of that was a hurried gasp, because Holmes had been so focused on the experience Amy Pond was giving him that he'd forgotten to breathe.

The sudden intake of oxygen cleared his head a bit, and as soon as he'd regained the slightest bit of control over his own body, Holmes hooked his hands under Amy's arms and pulled her up so that she was sitting on top of him once again. She had a mere second to blink at him confusedly, and then he'd rolled them both over and was hovering above her, holding both of her slender wrists above her head with one of his strong hands. His other hand travelled over the protruding bone of her hip and slipped down to her entrance once again, but this time he barely made contact, teasing her. She writhed beneath him, bucking her hips up and tossing her head as she tried to breach the minute distance between them. When it became apparent that Holmes was having far too much fun teasing her, however, Amy decided to retake control of the situation.

She lifted her legs up and curled them around Holmes' waist once again, hooking them together at the ankles, and with surprising ease guided herself onto him. Instantaneously Holmes went from mercilessly teasing her to being at her mercy. He might have been on top, but from this angle Amy could control the depth and speed of his thrusts, and she had decided to start off slow. After a few mismatched thrusts Holmes figured this out, and from the way he was kissing her she didn't think he minded too much about having to follow her lead. They fell into a steady rhythm, him pushing down and her rising up to meet him, slathering each other in opened mouthed kisses and hushed declarations of pleasure.

Amy curled her fingers into Holmes' dark, sweat-dampened hair and pulled his head down so that his ear was beside her swollen lips. "_Faster_," she moaned, almost demanding.

Obviously glad to oblige, Holmes stepped up the pace. She could feel her blood pumping through her veins, feel her muscles clenching tighter and tighter, winding up as she climbed towards that peak again –

"Deeper!" She moaned, not bothering with whispering this time.

She was clawing at his back so fiercely there was no doubt she was leaving scratch marks, and as she straightened her legs out to allow him to enter at a slightly different angle, so that he hit her _just there, ohgodyes, right there_ she couldn't stop the scream that tumbled past her lips. Holmes kissed her, sloppily, almost frantic with his thrusts now, and she somehow managed to kiss him back before her breath constricted to the point where she felt as though she'd stopped breathing.

"Amy," he moaned in that deep and throaty baritone that she'd been wanting to hear all night, "Amy, Amy…"

And with that she was done. She tipped right over the edge, spiralling down into her orgasm as wave after wave of pleasure rolled through her. She tensed underneath him, muscles tightening rapidly, clenching around him and pulling him over the edge with her. They bucked against each other, fitfully now, as they rode out the climax together.

When Amy next inhaled, it seemed like the sweetest breath she'd ever taken. The air was humid, stinking of sweat and sex, and her skin was sticking to the sheets – but, _fuck,_ that was _amazing_.

Holmes rolled off the top of her and lay on his back beside her on the bed, one arm flung over the side and his left foot resting against her right one. She gathered up the energy to roll onto her side and looked across at him, eyes closed and chest moving as he tried to catch his breath.

"Thank you," Amy breathed.

His eyes opened and he turned his head to look at her, pupils dilated and lips red from increased blood flow.

"You're welcome," he responded in typical Holmes fashion.

She closed her eyes with a content smile, but almost immediately the mattress shifted beneath her. She looked up to see Holmes standing beside the bed, running his hands through his mussed hair.

"Going somewhere?" She inquired lazily, trying not to show how intrigued she was.

"You didn't want to _cuddle _afterwards, did you?" Holmes replied scornfully, and the tone made Amy reach for the tangled bed sheet. She pulled it up to her chin and stared up at him with wide eyes as he walked around to her side of the bed and slipped his trousers back on.

"No," she said defensively, curling her legs up slightly beneath the thin cover, "But it's the middle of the night, surely you can just laze about in bed for a bit, yeah?"

"I don't sleep often," he replied as he headed for the door.

"I didn't mean sleep -" Amy began, but by then Holmes had already left the room without looking back.

* * *

**a.n. **There you are, you saucy little minxes! You all asked for it, and I hope you're happy with it. _Please review and tell me what you think! _The reason it's a couple of days late is because I'm so paranoid about this chapter that I went back and edited and re-edited and urgh. I tried to keep everyone in character, as always, but please keep in mind when judging that aspect that they're both younger here (a _lot_ younger in the case of Sherlock) than they are when we see them on the shows, so I imagine them being a bit more reckless at this stage in their lives. As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the update!


	7. Part One: Sentiment

**- Sentiment –**

It was a total cliché, Amy thought as she clenched the flimsy fabric of Holmes' sheet tightly to her chest, that the bed seemed far too large without him in it. Of course it did – it was _his bed, _after all. Amy didn't belong there. A few minutes ago, it had felt like this bed was made for her – that there was nowhere else in the universe more perfect for her to be at that very moment than on that bed, pinned beneath Sherlock Holmes as he moaned her name into the humid night air and thrust into her with a passion that was entirely unexpected and all the more arousing because of it.

But now the bed seemed empty and the cold draught hitting her bare back made her shiver uncomfortably. She looked to the doorway Holmes had just disappeared through and let out a heavy sigh before rolling onto her back and draping her arm across her eyes, trying to block everything out. Maybe it had been a mistake. Maybe this entire evening was a mistake. Maybe she should have just listened to Rory and –

_Rory._

Something sharp stuck in the back of her throat and she sat up, choking it down and squeezing her eyes shut against the image of Rory's innocent, beautiful face that appeared unbidden in her mind. Oh, god, what had she done?

Amy suddenly felt dirty. Dirty and humiliated, and desperately homesick. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and scooped up her stockings, knickers and skirt, flushing with embarrassment as she realised that her bra and shirt were out in the lounge. Already feeling too exposed, she yanked the small corner of sheet that was still tucked under the mattress free and wrapped it tightly around herself, holding it in place with her arms as she padded over to Holmes' chest of drawers. He'd probably despise her for stealing one of his shirts, but there was no way she was facing him in any state of undress again, not after he'd just got up and walked out on her like that.

She grabbed whatever was on the top of the pile - a neatly folded, dark purple shirt – and tucked it into the bundle of clothes she already held. Slamming the drawer closed with a bit more force than was necessary, she snuck over to the door and peeked around the corner to check where Holmes was. She couldn't see him in the armchair visible from this part of the hall, so assumed he must have been in the kitchen. The bathroom was right across from his bedroom, just two quick steps and she'd be safely inside, but she didn't want him to see her making the dash in nothing but his bedsheet. So she double checked that he wasn't anywhere in sight and then ran across to the white door on her tiptoes, frantically pulling the handle and rushing inside. As soon as both her feet hit the tiles she spun around and shut the door behind her, clicking the lock into place and dropping her clothes onto the floor.

Holmes' bathroom was small, with a shower in one corner and a counter running the length of the side wall. The tiles were white, with a blue border running along the crown and baseboard, and the occasional tile was adorned, seemingly at random, with a picture of a sailboat. Amy kept the sheet held tightly around herself as she walked over to the shower. She picked up a can of shaving cream off the counter and idly turned it in her hand, putting it back on the opposite side of the sink as she made her way across the room. She avoided her reflection in the mirror at all times, deliberately leaving the fan off so that the steam from the hot water would fog it up. She only let the sheet fall to her feet when the water was hot enough for her to step comfortably straight into the shower, and she was enveloped in a cloud of warm steam as soon as she did so.

For someone who kept their living quarters so untidy, Holmes was apparently pedantic with his personal hygiene. There was a collection of soaps, shampoos, conditioners and cleansers all standing in a rack suspended on the side wall, with a large, coarse-haired brush hanging from a hook on the bottom shelf. Two face washers were draped over the top of the wall, one cream coloured and one bright red, and – was that an _exfoliating glove_ next to them?

Amy tilted her head back into the spray of water, closing her eyes and letting the droplets cascade over her body. She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing it back off her face and thoroughly wetting it before she reached for the closest shampoo. The act of washing was cleansing, she found, and she lost track of time beneath the jets of water that helped wash the scent of Holmes from her skin. She lathered herself up so that she was coated entirely in products; soap on her body, cleanser on her face and conditioner in her hair, and then she carefully, thoroughly rinsed it all off.

It was helping, definitely, but she could still feel him, lingering on her like the ghostly imprint of her fingertips on the glass walls. She could still remember the shockwaves his touch had sent shooting through her veins, the rush of blood between her legs when his hands coiled around her hips, combed through her hair, curled inside her so that her every breath came in time with the movements of his fingers. She could still taste him on her lips, the tea and tobacco and heady lust, and when she ran her tongue over her bottom lip she could feel that it was still swollen and probably bruised, like her aching spine. She could still imagine his weight against her, the feeling of his hands cupped under her arse, the fire in his eyes when he watched her sliding her shirt off her shoulders. She could even hear the noise he made as she thrust against him, the sound like a stifled grunt that turned into a moan before he buried his face into her collarbone and bit down as she tightened around him –

Amy wrenched her hands away from where they'd trailed as she'd got lost in her memories, spinning around so quickly that she nearly slipped over. Because she hadn't imagined it, not that time. She'd felt his eyes on her, deducing and cataloguing and maybe even admiring, and she'd heard the noise that had escaped past his lips, definitely unintentionally. But by the time she turned around all she could see was the white door swinging shut, and a green towel folded neatly on the countertop that definitely hadn't been there before.

She was breathing heavily, angry and aroused and unsure what to do about either feeling. She turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, grabbed the green towel and hurled it against the door, which hadn't quite shut properly. She yelled, knowing perfectly well that Holmes could hear her, a wordless, frustrated growl, and smacked her open palm against the counter top.

And then her head cleared, and as the anger seeped out of her she was left feeling cold and empty. She collected the towel from where it had fallen to the floor and set about getting herself dressed and ready to leave, determined to put Sherlock Holmes and all of the insane things he made her feel in the past.

Once she was fully dressed, back in her stockings and skirt but in Holmes' purple shirt - which was a bit too baggy on her but would have been wonderfully fitted on him - she left the relative safety of the bathroom and padded slowly and calmly into the hall. Even before she stepped through the bathroom door she heard the dulcet tones of a violin. It was a bittersweet, seductive song, something that sounded to Amy as though it was full of dangerous yearning, and she kept as quiet as possible so as not to interrupt as she entered the lounge.

Holmes was standing in front of the window with his back to her, the violin that had been in his bedroom now propped under his chin as he moved the bow gracefully and effortlessly across its strings, making it sing for him just as he'd made Amy sing a chorus of pleasure a mere thirty minutes earlier. She knew that he was well aware of her presence, but she still didn't move as he continued to play, just watching the muscles of his back tense through the white shirt he'd put on. The lamp beside him illuminated the tips of his dark curls in an effect not unlike a halo, and she could just see the reflection of his angular face in the pane of the window. She watched as his reflected eyes darted across to where her own figure appeared on the glass, and then he drew the last note of the song from the violin and dropped the bow to his side, spinning around to face her with a mask of detachment covering his features.

"There are a few hours left until daylight," he began, voice flat and business-like. "If you wish to sleep until then, you may use my bed. I will remain out here. I may continue to play the violin but I assume that won't keep you awake."

He lifted the instrument up once again and went to swing his bow across to it, a clear signal that he was done with the conversation and wanted her to leave. But Amy was sick of Holmes' mood swings, and she refused to let him run away from her. Oh no, he wasn't going to get away with being downright rude that easy.

"What the hell were you doing in the bathroom when I was having a shower?" she asked, ignoring everything he'd said and every not-so-subtle hint he was giving her to go away.

That made him drop the arm holding the bow once more, and she didn't miss the tinge of pink that rose up above his collar.

"You did -" he started, and his voice came out in an awkward squeak. Hurriedly clearing his throat, he tried again, "You needed a towel."

"I locked the door for a reason, you know," Amy countered, folding her arms over her chest.

"The lock is broken," Holmes informed her, half turning away. "And it's my bathroom, anyway."

Struggling against her annoyance over that response, she exclaimed, "So what? I'm a guest, and just because the door is unlocked doesn't mean you can go peeking in at people while they're having a shower!"

"I believe that proper etiquette dictates that guests should ask permission of the host before using the facilities. And I wasn't _peeking in _at you," he sniped, upper lip curling, "I was giving you a clean towel to use."

"I know that you were watching me," Amy said before she could stop herself, and then her eyes went wide in embarrassment as the unsaid end of the sentence hung between them.

Holmes immediately caught onto her weakness and looked at her with a predatory glint in his dark eyes. "Watching you do what, Amy?"

Her mind raced. She could tell him the truth, push his boundaries even further – tell him about how she was remembering what they'd done, strut over to him and press a kiss to his neck, ask him if he wanted to do it again –

_No. _No, she had to focus. She was here to let Holmes know that she was having none of his bullshit, not to let herself get flustered and carried away by how good he looked in that shirt under the soft yellow light of the lamp…

"Sh-shower," she stuttered, trying to regain her composure, "You were watching me shower."

He gave her a knowing smirk and turned back to face the window, "I didn't think that a lack of clothing would be an issue after -" His sentence suddenly faltered as he cut himself off.

Oh, so he that was what he was running away from; the fact that they'd slept together. Interesting.

"After what, Holmes?" Amy asked in the same smug, mocking tone he'd used on her.

He pulled a long, screeching note from the violin in reply, making her shoulders hunch around her ears in distaste. The note lingered uncomfortably as Holmes drew it out for as long as possible, and when he finally scraped the bow sharply down across the strings, he levelled a deadly glare right at Amy's reflection.

"It was a mistake," he finally ground out, jaw tight and knuckles white where they gripped the neck of the violin.

"What was a mistake?" she pushed, danger laced along every word.

"_This!_" Holmes snapped, spinning around and pointing the bow at her like a sword. "This, you – and me, bringing you here - this entire night!"

Amy set her jaw, pushed her shoulders back and stared at him defiantly, but she couldn't hide the hurt that flashed across her eyes. "Is that so?"

"I asked for company," he quietly seethed, "not seduction."

"Oh, like this is all my fault?" She glared at him, hurt replaced by blazing indignation. "You have a will, you know? You could have stopped me -"

"I _tried _to -" he attempted to cut her off, but Amy was on a roll now and didn't even give him the chance.

"Yeah," she snorted sarcastically, "because a guy your size couldn't _possibly _restrain or stop me if they really wanted to."

Holmes advanced on her, bow still held out like a weapon. His voice was low and deadly as he chastised, "The point is that you should have stopped when I told you to -"

"_The point is,_" Amy yelled at him, hitting the bow violently to the side when he dared to poke it against her chest, "you're an arrogant, selfish, un-feeling arse!"

"And _you _are a petulant child with delusions of a grand life that you are never going to achieve!" Holmes growled back.

He went to turn around, and as he did so he ended up swatting her in the arm with the bow. It was obvious from the action itself that he hadn't meant to do it, but Amy was so riled up that even his _breathing _was pissing her off. So she grabbed it from him with a speed that he hadn't been expecting, and whipped his arm with it in return.

"You – are – a – joke!" she said, marking each word with a new whip.

He snatched it back from her and levelled it right above her heart. Maintaining the cold dispassion that he'd had throughout the entire exchange, he met her unbridled fire with a derisive reply of, "That's rich, coming from the eighteen year old who still believes in fairy tales."

He was trying to turn the argument back around on her, trying to make her feel like the crazy one when it was him who was going into panic-mode at the first sign of intimacy. She refused to let him change the topic, harnessing all of her anger and focusing a deadly glare on the back of his head as he turned away from her.

"You are, you're a joke" she spat, following him across the room as he stalked away to finally put his violin down. "You don't have any friends, because you think you're better than everyone you meet -"

"I _am _better than everyone," he replied smartly, the tight hunch of his shoulders belying the care with which he rested his instrument back in its case.

"No, you're not," Amy laughed, but it was a dry, humourless laugh, sharp enough to cut. "And deep down you know it. _That's _why you do cocaine, not because you're bored."

"Do not try to deduce me," he warned in a low growl. "You cannot win this game, Amelia."

"_Don't_ call me -" All of her anger instantly deflated as he spun around and came face-to-face with her, so close that their chests were touching, that she could feel him breathing, that she could see right into those piercing blue eyes. When she finished her sentence it was in a voice much smaller than the angry roar in which she'd started it, "- that."

She wanted to step back, but her feet wouldn't move. Holmes stared down at her, expression unreadable, eyes scanning every miniscule detail of her face.

"You have to stop playing, Amelia. You're too young, too sentimental." She felt him lift his arm, graze his right hand lightly over her hip and around onto her back. She tensed at the touch, and his lips puckered in a reassuring whisper of a noise that told her not to move. She remained still as his fingers trailed across her back to her spine, but when he made contact with the bruise there she yelped and once again arched forward, inadvertently pressing herself against him. His fingers stayed against the bruise, unyielding, applying more pressure and holding her to him. Stabs of pain were darting through her nerves from every point where his fingertips pressed into the tender skin, and she hissed, closing her eyes against the hurt. He bent his head, put his lips beside her ear and whispered, "And sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side."

"I wasn't aware that we were playing a game," she managed to lie in a manner that would have been convincing to anyone other than the world's only consulting detective.

She felt his lips curl into a smirk against the shell of her ear as he murmured, "We've been playing all night. And you thought you were winning."

"Is that why you ran away?" she asked, trying to ignore the way his left hand was gently grasping her wrist, fingers curling over her racing pulse. "Did you try to leave, forfeit the game before I could win?"

"You can't win," he breathed, removing his hand from her back. He kept his fingers laced around her wrist for the briefest of moments, lingering at that vital spot, before he released her.

Amy could have stepped back. She could have slapped him across the face for his arrogant assumption and the way he'd deliberately pushed against her bruised spine. She could have done a lot of things, but what she did was the one thing that she knew Holmes wasn't possibly expecting - She lifted her chin and pressed her lips to his, soft and innocent and devoid of any sense of a challenge. When she stepped back his jaw dropped open, and he blinked down at her in a bit of a daze.

"I like you, Sherlock," she said quietly, head bowed so that her wet hair fell forward over her shoulders. "Despite the fact that I keep yelling at you because you're being a total prat. I really like you. And -" she faltered here, took a breath and gathered her courage before admitting, "and I don't think that tonight was a mistake."

She glanced up at him through her eyelashes, just long enough to see him snap his mouth shut and tug on his shirt collar uncomfortably, and then she turned away and walked back into his bedroom without another word.

Time to make him chase her again.

It only took ten minutes for him to follow, but by that time Amy was curled up in his re-made bed, wet hair soaking through the pillow she'd claimed and dripping onto the mattress. Holmes stopped in the doorway, silhouetted by the light from the hall. He cleared his throat to get her attention and she squinted up at him.

"What?" she asked indelicately, letting him know that she was not really in the mood for another row.

His voice had an air of forced patience when he replied, "I'd like to talk."

"You're obviously capable of talking, but I don't see what that has to do with me," she said sharply, unable to hold her tongue, testing him.

After a tense pause, Holmes' tried again; "I'd like to talk with you."

Fumbling on the bedside table, Amy flicked the switch on the lamp closest to her in a wordless invitation to continue the conversation. She immediately screwed her eyes shut, groaning against the sudden change in brightness, and when she opened them again Holmes was standing above her, lips pressed into a thin white line.

He opened his mouth to speak, paused, closed it again, and let out a small sigh. He frowned down at her, frustration etched into the lines around his mouth, and she laughed at him.

"Do you have something to say to me, Sherlock?"

His eyes flashed and she knew – she'd already known, if she was being honest – that he wasn't going to apologise. Sherlock Holmes never apologised. But that was fine, because his discomfort now looked an awful lot like guilt, and that was enough for Amy to know that, internally at least, he really was sorry.

"We seem to be unable to hold a conversation without it turning into an argument," was what he eventually said.

Amy slid up on the bed into a sitting position, repositioning the pillow behind her so it cradled her back. "Yes, we've had quite a few rows for one night," she replied.

"And – and I have never met anyone quite as infuriating as you before, Amy." Holmes kept his eyes averted, hands clasped behind his back, posture perfectly upright – everything about him screamed defence.

She raised an eyebrow at him, wondering where he was going with this. "Um, thanks?"

"The thing is, I – you -" his words tripped over themselves, until he took a breath in and finally met her eye, "You don't make sense. And that infuriates me, because everyone makes sense to me. I can tell everything about anyone from a glance, but you – there always seems to be something more to discover about you. I'm not used to it, and it's disconcerting. Everything about you is a mystery and while I want nothing more than to discover you, I just can't seem to do it."

He was unbelievable. He was the drug-using, anti-social snob and he was calling _her _disconcerting?

"You could just ask, you know?" she offered simply.

Holmes looked surprised by her response. "What?"

"If there's something you want to know about me, you could just ask. You know, like a _normal person _would," she elaborated.

He blanched, "But asking is so – _boring."_

"- Easy," she finished at the same time.

Amy flashed him a genuine smile, and he scuffed one foot against the carpet.

"I'm not good with – with emotions," he said slowly.

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I figured that one out on my own, thanks."

Ignoring her interruption, he continued, "As you already know, I don't have any intimate relationships, in any sense of the word -" He paused for a millisecond, eyes darting down across Amy's chest, covered in his shirt, before they flickered back to her face. " – and I am not used to talking about these things."

"You're doing a crap job so far," she said. His face fell an almost imperceptible amount, and she immediately relented, "I'm joking, you prat. Keep going."

Still guarded, he rolled his shoulders back and cleared his throat. "Well, uh – that's it."

Amy raised an eyebrow at him. "That's it? You're just going to tell me you're crap at communicating and then not even attempt to talk to me?"

"I thought – What else is there to say?"

Urgh, why did he have to make _everything _so difficult?

Amy scooted over and patted the portion of mattress beside her waist. "Sit down."

"Why?" Holmes asked warily.

"To talk, you arse."

He hesitated, hands still clasped behind his back. "You want me to share a bed with you?"

"If you want to piss off back to the lounge feel free," she said with a shrug of her shoulders, "but this bed is way more comfortable than those armchairs."

With obvious reluctance, Holmes relented. He perched himself gingerly on top of the covers, parallel to Amy, with his long legs crossed at the ankles. "Well it's better than lying in the middle of the road," he said snarkily.

Amy shot him a glare before her features settled into a devious smile. Rolling onto her side to face Holmes, she lifted one slender hand and pointed to the photo he had on his chest of drawers. It was of two young boys in identical school uniforms, one slight and one a bit chubby. "Is that you and your brother in the photo?"

Holmes didn't even glance to where she was pointing – he probably had every detail of the entire room memorised.

For a while he looked like he was about to get up and leave again, but eventually he answered, "Yes, it's Mycroft and I."

"Mycroft," she repeated. He nodded curtly and she tried to disguise her laugh as a cough, but of course he wasn't fooled. "Your parents had – uh – a unique taste in names."

"Uncommon names for uncommon minds, Mother said," he told her with a faraway look.

"So Mycroft's your older brother?" Amy inquired, bringing his attention back to her. He nodded, and she probed, "And you said before you don't get along?"

"He's… tedious," Holmes explained, "Works for the government. He's climbing the corporate ladder, as they say, and his head is getting almost as big as his waist line."

She didn't bother trying to hide her laugh that time. She rolled her head back and chuckled, loud and full, and a few strands of her hair stuck to her cheek when she turned back to look across at him again.

"Did you get along when you were younger, then?" she queried, hands coming up to rest beneath her chin.

A reminiscent smile appeared on Holmes' lips, and he laughed. His baritone seemed to get richer the more he talked, "Not for as long as I can remember. Mycroft is the quintessential eldest child; likes to pretend he's in charge, desperately fights for our parents' affection, acts as though he is far more mature and sophisticated than I, the lowly younger brother. He's always been that way."

"Did you annoy him?"

"All the time," Holmes chuckled warmly, "When we were very small I used to beg him to join in my games – I'd always make him the villain, though, and of course he soon tired of that."

"What games did you play?" Amy was intrigued, propping herself up on her elbow now so that her view of his face wasn't partially obscured by the pillow.

"Pirates," he replied with a grin. "Believe it or not, I didn't always wish to be a consulting detective."

"You wanted to be a pirate?" Somewhat subconsciously, Amy found herself scooting closer to him on the mattress.

"Desperately," he nodded. "I built myself a ship out in the woods that bordered our property, named myself captain and imagined great adventures across the seven seas."

Suddenly, he seemed to realise that he was sharing personal memories with another human being, and he shook his head sharply, as though to knock some sense back into it.

Wanting to put him at ease, Amy said adoringly, "That sounds _wonderful._ I used to imagine I was a pirate sometimes, too."

"Did you?" Holmes glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, folded his hands on his chest and waited for her to tell him the story without appearing too interested.

"Yep, but most of the time I played Raggedy Doctor." Her eyes lit up at the mere mention of it, her lips spreading into a fond smile as her mind travelled back to afternoons with Rory and Mels, playing dress up and running around her backyard.

"After the 'Doctor' who fell out of the sky?" Holmes' scepticism was clear, but Amy chose to ignore it.

"We got the cardboard box that Rory's fridge came in, and we wrote Police Box on it. I'd make Rory dress up as the Raggedy Doctor, in one of his dad's old shirts, with a tie that nearly came down to his knees, and we'd put him in the box and he'd crash it into the shed. Then I'd come out and meet him, and we'd have to fight Mels, who was Prisoner Zero. She always got really into it, attacking Rory and yelling that the Doctor could never catch her loud enough for the entire village to hear."

"Your poor friends," Holmes said sullenly, but when Amy swatted his arm he broke out into a smile.

"Shut up," she reprimanded, but the effect was dulled by her giant yawn half way through.

"You're tired," he observed, rolling onto his side to mirror her position. "You should sleep."

"I'm fine," she protested, waving away his concerns.

"That's a matter of opinion," he teased, "Raving about 'Raggedy Doctors' falling from the sky…"

Amy narrowed her eyes – which were beginning to feel very heavy - at him, but she was grinning. "When he comes back," she breathed, "I am going to get him to take me to you, just so I can show you that you were wrong."

"I suppose I'll never see you again, then," he said, and she was so tired that she almost thought he looked genuinely upset by the prospect.

"You said this was for one night only," she reminded him, trying to focus on his expression even as her eyelids were falling closed.

"So I did," he replied, and his voice was soft and a little bit sad.

Her eyes fell shut and she exhaled peacefully. She felt the mattress shift slightly, and then felt his hand brush the bare skin of her arm as he pulled the sheet up to cover her shoulders. It was warm and lovely, just lying here in bed with Holmes, not even touching, and suddenly everything that happened over the night seemed to catch up with her at once.

The fog of sleep was clouding in at the corners of her mind, and her voice came out in a drowsy murmur when she said, "It doesn't have to be, if you don't want it to."

Just before she succumbed completely to sleep, she imagined she heard him say, "I'd love you to come back to me, Amelia."

…

The morning came far too soon, bringing with it a harsh kind of reality. They both had lives to get back to, and it was time for Amy to return to Leadworth, to Rory and all the things she'd been ignoring for the past fifteen hours. When she'd awoken Holmes had been lying exactly where he'd been when she'd fallen asleep, wide awake and staring at the ceiling. He'd obviously moved while she'd slept, though, because her remaining clothes were folded in a neat and convenient pile at the foot of the bed.

He'd watched her dress, not in a voyeuristic way but more in a comfortable one, and he'd offered her an apple and a cup of tea for breakfast. She took the tea but declined the apple, and then she was standing on his front step, wallet and phone in hand, police hat on head – good for covering bed hair, she'd told Holmes, to which he'd politely informed her that he didn't care – preparing herself to say the inevitable goodbye.

"Well." She rocked back on her heels and smiled up at him. "I hope you had a fun birthday, Sherlock Holmes."

His lips quirked up in a knowing smirk, and he told her, "I most certainly did. All thanks to you, Amelia Pond."

She pouted, "Don't call me that."

"I'll continue to call you that for as long as it continues to get that reaction," he informed her, and she stuck her tongue out at him.

"So you will call me then, yeah?" She tried to disguise the hope she felt blooming in her chest as light hearted teasing, but failed miserably.

Instead of answering, Holmes held up a hand in a gesture that told her to wait there, and disappeared back in to the apartment. Amy leant to the side, trying to peer around the partially closed door, but couldn't see anything. Her heart felt heavy and the back of her throat was dry with the promise that she was close to crying, for some stupid reason, god knows why, she barely knew Holmes and it was just one night anyway, so why was she so upset? She huffed and blew a stray strand of red hair out of her eyes, thinking that if Holmes didn't hurry up she was just going to go, save them both the awkwardness of an actual goodbye –

But then Holmes was back, and he was holding the dark blue scarf that had started this whole thing. He stepped down to join her on the stoop and draped it around her neck.

"As we agreed," he explained.

"But – Sherlock, I can't -" Amy protested, hands instinctively rising to grasp the soft wool.

He smiled. "You can. We made a deal, and I am honouring it. The scarf is yours. Besides…" He lowered his eyes, "I want you to have something to remember me by."

There was a bittersweet feeling to the exchange, as though things between them had come full circle.

"Is that your way of saying goodbye?" she choked out against the lump that had lodged itself firmly in her throat.

"Emotions get in the way," he whispered, avoiding her eye.

"And sentimentality is a weakness, I know," she sulked, rolling her eyes. "Thank you for taking me in for the night, and for – you know. That was a bit sentimental of you."

"I won't be making that mistake again," he informed her, and from his tone she couldn't tell if he was joking or not.

Before she could talk herself out of it, Amy leant forward and enveloped Holmes in a hug, wrapping her arms around his neck and holding him tight. She pressed her mouth to his, in a soft, seductive kiss, snaking her hands into his curls and twirling them around her fingers. She could taste the strong tobacco from the cigarette he'd smoked while she'd drank her tea, and she could smell just a hint of her own perfume still lingering on the side of his neck. She hoped that she'd left her scent on his bed, that he'd lie in it tonight and be reminded of her. His arms wrapped around her waist with a now familiar weight, his lips were soft against hers and there was a good amount of give and take to the kiss that made her arms squeeze just a little bit tighter around his shoulders. It lasted for a brief, wonderful moment that seemed to stretch into an eternity, and then he was pushing her away.

"You're going to miss your train," he said without inflection.

She smirked, "Oh, no, you're not doing that to me again."

He smirked back at her, almost proud, and stepped onto the curb to hail her a cab. When one pulled up he told the driver where to take her, and then held her door open for her.

"I will come back for you, you know," she told him through her open window, utterly determined, "When the Doctor comes back for me, we'll come get you and take you on an adventure with us."

"Amy Pond, you are mad and impossible," was his cryptic reply.

"And that's why you like me, Sherlock Holmes," she said with a smile.

He stepped back up to his door, and she waved the end of his scarf at him to say goodbye as the taxi took off. She turned around to watch him through the rear window for the entire length of the street, trying to memorise his tall, slender form, his dark curls and his piercing blue eyes. Just before they turned the corner, she thought she saw him lift his arm to wave goodbye, but she'd never be sure.

* * *

**a.n. **this chapter was an absolute pain to write. on a writing level, because I had no idea how to make them recover from the last chapter and then also say goodbye. and on a personal level because my nan suddenly and completely unexpectedly passed away last week, so I've been really busy helping organise the funeral and sort out her estate, and emotionally I'm all kinds of messed up. basically I'm not happy with this chapter at all, but I hope you guys think it's okay. please let me know, and please tell me you're excited for the next stage of this story - because the Doctor will be making an appearance _very soon_! thanks for reading, thanks for sticking by me, and thanks for being your wonderful selves.


	8. Interlude: Time

**a.n. **thank you so much to everyone for all of the kind words and support you've given myself and my family, you're all so lovely and understanding and oh my gosh you have no idea how nice it was to log on and read all your lovely reviews and messages. I'm distracting myself from emotions with writing at the moment, so here's another chapter for you all. it basically explains what's happened in Amy and Sherlock's lives since their one night stand, and it gives you a bit more of an insight into Sherlock's perspective, too. there's canon compliant drug use (although I'm not sure about the time-line, but I think I already stuffed that up for this story anyway) and there's also established canon character death. it gets a bit heavy at times but nothing too over the top, and next chapter the Doctor's in to brighten things up a bit. thank you so much for reading, please leave a review with any thoughts you have about the story!

* * *

**Interlude**

**- Time –**

Amy Pond arrived back in Leadworth without a fuss.

Rory came to see her as soon as his shift at the hospital finished, only to find Mels already sprawled languidly on the bed. When he asked how London had been he received a vague answer of _"Yeah, alright." _Mels' bored expression and Amy's dismissive wave of a hand told him that he'd already missed the detailed run down and their attention spans wouldn't allow them to repeat it.

Mels complained about Amy not inviting her out, grumbling that if she'd known she was going to go clubbing she would have tagged along. Rory gave an indistinct mumble of agreement, and Amy threw herself back on her bed dramatically and told them that it wasn't like she'd planned to miss the train home, so could they shut up about it please?

Guilt churned in her stomach as she listened to her two best friends turn the conversation to inane things like what was on the telly, and who had broken up or got together since they'd graduated school a few months back.

When Amy finally worked up the courage to meet Rory's eye he smiled at her, and something inside her chest swelled with relief.

"_Sorry,"_ she mouthed, and she was genuine. Seeing him actually sitting there in her room, still in his nurse's scrubs and with purple bags under his light green eyes, every fibre of her being ached with remorse.

He shook his head once, just a small movement, and gave her a smile that said that everything was alright.

Later, when Mels had left, the two of them curled up on Amy's bed and when Rory kissed her she let herself melt into his touch until all traces of Sherlock Holmes were wiped from her body and her memory.

Until –

"Amy, what's this bruise?" Rory asked through the comfortable silence afterwards, and Amy jerked out of his arms so quickly that for a moment the whole world span. "Amy, are you okay?"

Rory's hands were on her back, rubbing her bare shoulders, comforting and supportive and worried.

"I fell," she replied on auto-pilot, barely registering the shot of pain as he lightly pressed the edge of the bruise.

"Fell on what? How hard? Amy, this is a huge bruise, it looks really bad." Rory was gently turning her around to face him now, peering at her face with intense worry.

Her head cleared and she tried to look convincing as she told him, "I was wearing heels last night. You know me… I was running across the lights and I fell. Really, it's fine. It's just a bruise." Rory didn't look assured, so she leant forward and kissed him gently. "I'm fine."

"I'm going to keep an eye on it," he promised.

"Are you just looking for an excuse to get me to take my shirt off?" Amy teased.

Rory fell asleep early, tired from work, and Amy slid off the bed carefully, trying not to disturb him. She walked over to the dark blue scarf draped casually on top of her jacket from that morning. She picked it up and ran the pads of her thumbs over the soft material, and then she tucked it carefully into the bottom drawer of her dresser.

Rory stirred when she got back into bed, draping an arm over her waist and nuzzling his face into her neck. Through her guilt and confusion, she tried to remind herself that it was okay that his presence made her happy, that she was _supposed _to enjoy having him there.

She fell asleep tangled in Rory Williams' arms, but that night Amy dreamt of a large bed in a small apartment on Montague Street and a man named Sherlock Holmes who refused to sleep in it because it smelt of her.

…

The black car pulled up on the curb as soon as the taxi was out of sight, catching Sherlock just as he was about to ascend back up the stairs to analyse the results of the test currently bubbling away on his stove top. He grimaced before the door even opened, and when he heard footsteps approaching he openly scowled.

"She was pretty."

Mycroft Holmes was practically humming with amusement, solid form encased in an expensive suit and perpetual umbrella slung over his forearm. He'd had eggs for breakfast, poached, and had already been to one meeting, probably with a foreign dignitary. He was on his way to another now, and hadn't yet noticed the slight scuff on his left shoe that came from when he'd tapped it nervously against the corner of his desk while booking his next appointment with the dietician.

"How nice of you to bring me a morning snack," Sherlock said, feigning cheerfulness. He paused just long enough for Mycroft to narrow his eyes before adding the insult, "Or did you eat all of the muffins yourself on the way here? My, my, I'd be nervous about seeing my dietician too if I cheated as much as you did."

"Don't be petty, Sherlock, it doesn't suit you," was Mycroft's dispassionate reply, although Sherlock didn't miss the slight tug he gave his waistcoat.

"Why are you here, Mycroft?" he asked shortly, not in the mood for offensive banter.

"That girl spent the night here," his brother replied, looking at him expectantly.

When he didn't continue Sherlock snapped, "Are you going to just spout facts at me or are you going to explain how that concerns you?"

"It concerns me a great deal," Mycroft told him, and then glanced at the old lady two houses down who was tottering out to the get the morning paper as she did every day at this hour. He asked pointedly, "Perhaps we could continue this discussion inside?"

Sherlock huffed but didn't outright argue, and ten minutes later he was settled in an armchair across from his older sibling, nursing a cup of tea and the beginnings of a headache.

"The girl -" Mycroft began.

"Amelia Pond," he interrupted in a snap, getting more annoyed with the other man's presence with each passing second.

"I am well aware of her name," Mycroft informed him. "Amelia Pond, age eighteen, originally from Inverness, but at age seven she moved to Leadworth, where she currently resides."

Sherlock eyed him warily. "I wasn't aware that the government was keeping tabs on every civilian now."

"They're not," Mycroft said plainly, reaching for the biscuits Sherlock had deliberately laid out and then retracting his hand. "Also at age seven, Amelia Pond reported that a man calling himself the Doctor had crashed a blue police box into her backyard. He subsequently vanished, but she insisted to all four psychiatrists that attempted to treat her that he was real and he was coming back for her."

Sherlock tensed. "How do you know this?"

"I have more authority than you like to believe, dear brother," Mycroft answered condescendingly.

"_Why _do you know this?"

Mycroft set his tea down and looked his younger brother straight in the eyes. "You can't see her again."

"I wasn't planning to," Sherlock replied quickly – a bit _too _quickly, judging by the curl of Mycroft's lips – and then added slyly, "But if you're so against the idea perhaps I will."

Mycroft's mouth immediately set in a straight line, and his tone left no room for argument when he insisted, "You mustn't, Sherlock."

Sherlock pushed back, asking eagerly, "_Why?_ Are you telling me that there's more to her story of the Doctor than just fantasy?"

"I'm telling you that she is trouble, and not of the entertaining sort. I don't know what happened between the two of you last night -"

"I'm surprised you don't have the apartment bugged," Sherlock muttered.

"- but it can't happen again. And if you insist on ignoring my orders, I will _make sure _that the two of you don't cross paths again," Mycroft said sternly.

"You can't tell me who I can and can't socialise with," Sherlock said indignantly, rising to his feet.

Mycroft stood to meet him, staring him down. "We both know that you don't socialise, brother," he said. "I'm warning you, for your own good, stay away from Amelia Pond. Forget about her, forget about everything she told you and move on." When Sherlock's eyes blazed with a challenge, Mycroft added, softer, "You barely know her. Stop now, before she can break your heart. Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock."

The younger Holmes felt something in his chest deflate at those words, and before the pain could show on his face he spun around and stalked into the kitchen, snatching a packet of cigarettes up off the table and lighting one with the flame burning beneath a Bunsen burner on the stove. He inhaled deeply and heard his brother's footsteps as he came to stand in the door way.

"I am sorry, Sherlock," Mycroft's voice drifted to him, low and ever so slightly apologetic at first. And then, firmer, "But this is for your own good." Sherlock didn't reply, just took a deeper drag on his cigarette and closed his eyes against the things Mycroft was saying. He continued, "And if I find out that you're using, I will make sure that you are sent to rehab. You will lose this apartment, and your job, and everything you've worked for. Do not let that happen."

Sherlock listened to the front door slam shut behind his older brother, smirking as it did so. He finished the cigarette and dropped it in the sink before turning to the elaborate case on the mantelpiece, grabbing out one bag of cocaine and setting about ignoring everything Mycroft had told him to do.

…

Two weeks after the fact Amy found herself a little tipsy at a mate's birthday party, and as she leant against the side wall of the house and puffed clouds of smoke into the night sky she tapped out a message to Holmes.

_I'm wearing your scarf. Amy xx_

Thirty seconds later she received a reply.

_You seem to have developed a habit of wearing my clothes. – SH._

She bit her bottom lip, smiling coyly and feeling something like excitement bubble up inside her.

_It's not my fault half my outfit got discarded in your lounge and I ended up in the bedroom._

She pressed send and giggled to herself, taking a deep drag of her cigarette and closing her eyes as she waited for the reply. The air was crisp but Amy felt warm, comforted by the alcohol swimming through her veins and the dark blue scarf that was indeed curled around her neck. Mels had found it in her drawer, commented on how it was the same colour as the Doctor's ship and insisted she wear it to the party tonight.

"Amy, there you are!" Rory's excited call broke through her reverie.

She started, stepping away from the wall and turning to look at her recently-official boyfriend. "Rory," she said stupidly, blinking up at him.

He looked really good tonight, in jeans and a black shirt that made him appear lean instead of gangly and awkward. He'd done something with his hair, styled it up a bit, and it made his cheekbones stand out more. Amy liked it.

"Everyone's wondering where you went. They're about to do the cake," he explained.

She dropped the cigarette to the ground and stomped on it with her heel, extinguishing the embers. "Coming," she said brightly, flashing him a toothy grin. Her phone buzzed in her hand and she instinctively glanced down at the screen, illuminating her hand in the dark.

"Oh, were you on the phone?" Rory asked, eyebrows furrowing slightly.

She glanced up at him and then back down at the mobile.

"No," she said, deleting the message without reading it. She slipped the phone back into her pocket and ran up to him, wrapping her arms around his neck and planting a kiss right on his lips. When she pulled back they were both breathless, and she murmured, "You look so hot tonight."

"So do you," he said appreciatively, rubbing his hands up her back.

"Get a room!" Mels yelled at them from just inside the door. She grinned as she scolded them, "You two are bloody hopeless. Come on, I want some of this cake already!"

Amy curled her fingers through Rory's and they followed Mels back into the throng of the party, and when Rory shared his slice of cake with her Amy gave him the sweetest smile she had and murmured, "You're the best."

…

Sherlock was fascinated by the idea of the Doctor. It had been a few weeks since Amy had first told him the story of the man who she thought had fallen out of the sky, but ever since Mycroft had endorsed his existence the younger Holmes had been obsessed with the idea of tracking him. He was a detective after all, and finding people by putting together clues was what detectives did best. The problem was, Sherlock had researched and hunted down clues and watched interviews with supposed eye-witnesses – always a shaky testimony, even in the best of cases, so he didn't put much weight on these – and while he'd found a wealth of reported sightings he hadn't found anything that made any sense.

The face of the man changed between accounts, which stretched over not decades but centuries. The stories ranged from the mundane to the fantastical, but none told him how to find the elusive Doctor. He'd managed to hack into some of Mycroft's information, which had led him to the website of an organisation titled UNIT – United Nations Intelligence Taskforce – but no matter what he'd tried he hadn't been able to hack his way into their systems.

What had started out as a question –_ Doctor Who? _- on the wall in the room Amelia Pond occupied inside his mind palace soon spread like a virus, consuming the walls, the floor, the ceiling, merging with the identity of Amy herself and spilling out into a separate room entirely. He paced through it, picking out bits of information and going over them again and again, but still it just didn't make sense.

He'd been meaning to ask Amy for more information, and when she messaged him a fortnight after they'd met he thought it was the perfect opportunity. Not allowing himself to get distracted by her obvious flirting, he texted:

_I have information about your Doctor. – SH._

She didn't reply. Not straight away, not later that night, not the next day or the next week or the next fortnight. By the next month he'd almost forgotten that he'd texted her at all. That was okay. Sherlock didn't need her anyway, she'd already told him everything she knew. Amy Pond may have started him on this search but he could easily continue it without her involvement.

...

Amy never lost faith, not really.

The Doctor finally came back, as raggedy and insane as ever, and Amy whacked him in the face with a cricket bat. She did it in self defence, mainly, but really he deserved it for being twelve years late.

She didn't believe him, at first, because she was nineteen now and her last teenage year had really started to seem like the beginning of the end. She was too old to believe in fairy tales like the raggedy man who'd crashed his time machine into her shed and eaten fish fingers and custard.

But he was there, the Doctor, asking her to believe for twenty minutes - and Amy did. While Mels was off on one of her unannounced junkets to god-knows-where, Rory was there in Leadworth, right in the thick of things in the hospital. They found Prisoner Zero, lost Prisoner Zero, and then eventually got him arrested and saved the entire planet from incineration. The aliens left, but then the Doctor called them back and gave them a talking to all while deciding on a tie, and Amy was in awe.

It was absolutely amazing; without a doubt the best day of her life.

Until the Doctor just ran off and disappeared again, this time without even the promise of "_five minutes_" to tide her over until his next appearance. Amy closed her eyes and felt the physical pain of her heart breaking as the wound she'd carried since she was seven was ripped violently open all over again.

…

It was pure coincidence that Sherlock bumped into her on the street, such an unexpected occurrence that for a moment he thought he was hallucinating. But no, there she was – Amy Pond, a year older but still so much the same. Her red hair was tumbling around her shoulders in soft curls, her eye make-up and extremely short skirt length suggesting that she was on her way to a party. The ladder in her stockings suggested that she didn't much care about the other people at the party, and the thick coat of lip gloss and perfectly manicured, bright red nails hinted that she was still working as a kissogram. Her eyes widened in surprise when she saw his face, and her pink lips parted as she inhaled sharply.

"Sherlock," she breathed, and suddenly it was like he was animated again after months of being still.

"Amelia Pond," he greeted, a smug smirk settling on his face.

She scrunched up her nose. "Don't call me that."

"On your way to a party." It should have been a question, but it wasn't.

Amy smiled at him knowingly. "Yeah, I am. I've think I've got a bit of time to kill though, if you want to catch up?"

She was looking at him hopefully, but he made a show of checking his watch before saying, "I know a good café just around the corner."

So they began the short walk, and Amy started talking. "Mels – do you remember Mels? – well, she's constantly on the move. Darting about all over the place, but she always manages to find her way back to Leadworth. Anyway, this week she's staying with a girl in London, and she invited Rory and I to come to a party she's throwing tonight. We had to catch an early train because Rory needs to drop some stuff off at Saint Bartholomew's for a colleague."

"I work in their mortuary sometimes," Sherlock told her.

With mousy little Molly Hooper, who had just started and was so eager to please and easy to read that he already had her doing everything for him, including getting his coffee.

Amy blinked at him. "Still a consulting detective then?"

"Yes," he affirmed, stepping in front of her to hold the door to the café open.

She smiled gratefully as she ducked under his arm and into the warm café. They settled at a corner table and he watched as she shrugged her pea coat off her shoulders and draped it over the back of her chair. They both ordered coffee, and then Amy leant back in her seat and looked at him appraisingly.

"How are you?"

"Fine," he answered quickly, honestly. "I've got a lot of work at the moment. Mycroft's not being as much of a pain as usual. How are you?"

"As if you don't already know," she replied, eyes sparkling. "Go on, tell us what you've figured out."

He took a sip of his coffee and let his eyes roam over her, sitting in front of him close enough to touch, enthusiasm stretching her smirk into a smile.

"You're on your way to a party - " he began, only to have her cut him off.

"That's not impressive, I _told you that_!"

"- hosted by a person you don't like very much," Sherlock elaborated, and she leant forward in interest. "You stepped in a puddle on the way here and it probably made you certain that this party is not going to be worth the hassle. You're still working as a kissogram, but you're thinking of giving it up, and -" the words wanted to die in his throat, but he forced them out normally, "you and your boyfriend have finally made it official."

"How did you -" Amy began to ask, but at that moment her phone rang and she hurried to answer it. "Sorry, it's Rory, I just have to tell him where we are." Sherlock watched her take the call, hold the phone to her ear and smile instinctively as Rory's voice drifted through the receiver. "Hi, how'd it go? - Good, yeah, I ran into a friend. We're at a café, come meet us."

She gave him the name and location, and then set the hot pink mobile on top of the table. Amy was different, somehow, Holmes thought. She was still somewhat flighty and irrational and emotional – _so emotional _– but she just wasn't the same. She seemed… muted.

"Was I right?" Sherlock asked.

Amy laughed and she seemed to light up from the inside out, "Yes! Yes, you got everything right. I still don't know how you do that. How do you notice such tiny things?"

"Powers of perception," he answered simply.

"Yeah, well, I think yours are super powers. I tried it, you know? After – after I met you, I tried to deduce things about people. But I was rubbish at it! I kept getting it completely wrong, it was so embarrassing," she told him, laughing at herself and covering her face with her hands.

"It takes practice," he said gently, preparing to broach the topic he'd been waiting to ask about since he'd first bumped into her on the street. He steepled his hands on the table and asked, "So, did your Doctor ever come back for you?"

"He did!" Amy answered immediately, but there was a reserved nature to the response. Her eyes shone, but her hands immediately dropped to her lap, fingers twisted nervously, and her smile was small and sad, more reminiscent than excited for the future. "Yeah, he came back. And then he left again."

"He left you again?"

"Yeah, he's made a bit of a habit of it, hasn't he?" she tried to joke, taking a sip of her coffee and looking down at her heels. "I suppose it's okay though, really. I mean, if he came back once he's bound to come back again, yeah? I'll just wait for him."

"What if he doesn't appear for another twelve years?" Sherlock inquired seriously.

"Well then I guess I'll just – Hang on, you're talking like you believe me," Amy gaped at him. "Do you believe me now?"

Sherlock looked away, straightened his collar and cleared his throat. When she looked at him imploringly he said, "I've been doing some research."

"Oh, so you'll believe other people's accounts of meeting the Doctor but not mine?" she asked accusingly.

"I believe the _evidence,_" he replied.

She opened her mouth, probably about to hurl an insult at him, but then a skinny man with a mop of brown hair and a nose out of proportion to the rest of his face entered the café and called out to her. Sherlock scraped his eyes over the man's lean form. He was the same age as Amy, he'd been putting in extra shifts at the hospital, he drank too much coffee and was desperate to settle down. Sherlock wondered what she saw in him.

"Rory," Amy greeted, smiling up at him as he made his way over to their table. "This is Sherlock."

"Sherlock," Rory repeated, offering a hand to shake but glancing between the two of them warily. "Sorry, how do you two -"

"Sherlock's the son of one of Aunt Sharon's friends," Amy offered, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.

Realisation dawned on Rory's face and he dropped Sherlock's hand immediately. "You're the -"

"- One who let me stay at his house when I missed the train a few months ago," Amy hurriedly intervened, drawing her bottom lip up between her teeth as she waited to see if Rory would accept this explanation.

"Yes, because of her I had to sleep on the couch for the night," Sherlock agreed for her benefit, even though he wanted nothing more than to tell this boy what had really happened between him and his girlfriend.

Rory relaxed slightly – although the tension in his shoulders suggested that he was subconsciously prepared to punch Sherlock at the slightest provocation - and after about a minute of awkward small talk he reminded Amy that they had a party to get to, and she gulped down the rest of her coffee and stood to leave.

"Call me, okay?" she said to Sherlock, eyes serious.

He nodded silently, trying to simultaneously prepare himself for the moment when she was going to drape her arms around him in a hug and also brace himself for the chance that she was going to walk away without touching him. She went to hug him and then stopped awkwardly, with one arm held out in front of herself halfway through the motion of wrapping around his shoulders. He clasped her hand in his, the tips of his fingers grazing the pulse racing at her wrist, and they shook hands like acquaintances.

"Goodbye," he said stiffly.

"Bye," she said warmly, waving as Rory intertwined their fingers and led her from the café.

She glanced back over her shoulder at him as they passed by the front window, and the corners of her mouth turned down when she met his cold gaze. As soon as she was out of sight, Sherlock retrieved his phone from his coat pocket and deleted Amy Pond's number.

…

In the absence of the Doctor – and, to a lesser extent, Sherlock Holmes – Amy's life fell into a routine.

She continued working as a kissogram, and the cop outfit remained her favourite. She painted her nails a new colour every Sunday, but she liked the red polish most, because it felt sexy and sophisticated and Amy was not a little girl anymore.

She tried to keep track of Mels, but that girl was getting more and more wild and there were only so many times Amy could afford to bail her out before it got ridiculous. She continued to fall for Rory slowly, opening her heart up to him piece by shattered piece, and his skilled nurse's hands gradually stitched her back together.

She sketched pictures of her Doctor, in his raggedy clothes and then in his new tweed jacket and bowtie – why he chose the bowtie, out of everything in that hospital locker room, she did not know – and she texted Holmes a few casual, friendly messages, but of course nothing came from either pursuit.

Amy continued to stargaze, looking out for a blue police telephone box and wondering why all the most interesting men had to be lunatics who loved disappearing without warning.

…

Sherlock was bored.

The cases the police force were giving him were boring. Easy to solve robberies, missing persons that were just runaway teens easily located by the homeless network, a jealous wife who stabbed her adulterer husband and tried to frame the maid. Nothing exciting, nothing scintillating.

The walls of his apartment became stifling, but there was nothing of any interest outside them. Mycroft had gotten a promotion and was tracking his every move since he'd been discovered having coffee with Amy, which made the outside world even less appealing.

He lay about in his pyjamas, plucking the strings of his violin and researching the Doctor whenever he had a bolt of inspiration, but he'd hit a metaphorical brick wall with his study of the strange man and nothing he did seemed to even dent the mystery.

He thought about Amy, sometimes. About her feisty temper and indignation in the face of his deductions. About how she'd kissed him, and for the first time ever Sherlock had thought that human interaction might be worth something after all. He remembered the cadence of her voice, the Scottish accent that perfectly matched her red hair. He remembered the way she looked, lying in the middle of the road and pointing at the stars, and the fear in her eyes when he'd saved her life, quickly replaced by lust. He dreamt of her skin against his, stuck together with sweat, and the shape of her body beneath his hands. He thought about how infuriatingly impossible she was, and he wondered what she was doing as he was lying there thinking about her. He imagined that she was with Rory, the concerned boyfriend who she'd returned to Leadworth for, and he rolled over and buried his face in the side of the couch.

…

Amy said yes when Rory proposed. Of course she said yes. There was no reason at all to say no.

Rory was sweet, Rory was funny, Rory would never do anything to hurt her, Rory had loved her since they were seven.

So when Rory asked her if she would do him the honour of marrying him, Amy said yes.

He slipped the diamond ring onto her finger and kissed her passionately, and she shrieked with excitement when he lifted her feet off the ground and spun her in a circle.

Because this was exciting. She was excited. She was going to marry a man who loved her more than life itself, and she loved him too. She did, really, deep down. Of course she did, or she wouldn't have stayed with him, she wouldn't have said yes. She loved Rory. He just loved her more, that was all.

When they'd told Mels she'd screamed and jumped up and down and hugged them both so tightly Amy had thought her ribs were going to crack. They'd never seen her this excited about anything before, which was weird because she always said how much she hated weddings.

When they asked her why she was so happy she replied, "Because you two are perfect for each other. You're meant to be."

A week after the proposal Amy looked at the ring in its little red box on her nightstand, reflecting the moonlight filtering in through her curtains, and she thought, completely at random, of Sherlock Holmes and how he'd known that Rory was her boyfriend before she'd known herself.

She grabbed her mobile and typed him a message, the first in a long time. She hesitated and almost decided not to send it, but eventually did.

_Rory and I are engaged._

The reply was instant:

_Congratulations. – SH._

…

Sherlock was bored, so he started using more.

It was a gradual increase, and he was safe – always safe, always sterile, never out of control. Never enough to overdose, but enough to give him a rush. Injecting was quick, and he was good at it after all the practice he'd gotten in university. Two point five grams a week, he told himself. That was the limit, and he stuck to it. For the most part.

When he got the text from Amy – of course it was from her, of course she'd kept his number even though he'd deleted hers, of course she'd text him the bad news - saying that she and Rory were engaged, Sherlock used up the last of the stash in the box on the mantle and took a hit big enough to give him tremors. His pulse was fluttering as he shakily made his way to the toilet, rapidly but weakly beating against his skin. He was nauseous but not enough to actually vomit, and he sat on the tiles berating himself until the high was over and he crashed.

Of course Mycroft caught him. His darling brother sent him straight to a rehabilitation centre, despite Sherlock's insistence that he did not need outside assistance to stop using - because that's what this was, he was a _user, _not an _addict. _The rehab centre was out in the country and filled to the brim with celebrities trying to keep their addictions to drugs, alcohol and sex out of the eyes of the media, all hush-hush.

Detective Inspector Lestrade seemed genuinely upset when he found out that Sherlock was going. He was the only one on the force allowed to know where he was going and why – everyone else was to be told that he was away on a holiday, and even then only when they explicitly asked - and the DI's expression suggested that he was genuinely concerned for Sherlock's welfare. As Sherlock had dismissed the incarceration as nothing more than a precaution to shut up his brother, Lestrade had wondered out loud who the police force were going to get to help them now. Sherlock had quipped that maybe if his force stopped being so imbecilic and incompetent then they wouldn't _need _outside help. Lestrade told him to have a nice holiday.

Months went by, and as Sherlock struggled to overcome the crippling boredom of sobriety while surrounded by addicts, he found himself filling his time and his thoughts with things other than the Doctor. There was enough intrigue in the lives of the other patients and enough affairs between the staff to keep his deduction skills honed. He renovated his mind palace, moving both the Doctor and Amy Pond – because their identities were so inextricably linked in his thoughts now that to move one was to move the other - to a small corner of the property and put a lock on the door.

When he got out he resumed his job as consulting detective immediately, filling his time with the most interesting cases the force had to offer him. An old client, the amicable Mrs Hudson, offered him a flat on Baker Street, but he wouldn't have been able to afford it without Mycroft's assistance. Refusing to stoop so low – his resentment for his brother had only grown over the course of his time in rehab – he resolved to find a roommate to share the expense.

He was in the lab at St. Bart's hospital when the rotund but bearable Mike Stamford introduced him to Doctor John Watson. Invalided home from Afghanistan, looking for a flatmate and with a psychosomatic limp that Sherlock was sure he could rid him of. He liked him immediately, and as soon as John stepped into 221B Sherlock Holmes knew that he'd finally found someone he could live with.

…

It was the night before her wedding when the Doctor finally came back for Amy. Two years late, _again, _and as unapologetic as ever. She ran away with him, utterly captivated by his charm, and finally able to live the dream she'd held on to for fourteen long years.

He took her on marvellous adventures throughout Time and Space. She met the enigmatic River Song, she snogged the Doctor and then he went and fetched Rory to remind her why she'd fallen in love with him in the first place. They fought sexy fish vampires in Venice, died in a dream after Amy realised that she didn't want to live without Rory, and then they met the Silurians – and that was where everything went wrong.

"Tell me it's going to be okay, you have to _make it okay!_" Amy howled, staring at the Doctor through her tears as Rory lay on the ground outside, his dead body being absorbed by the light from the crack.

A horrible aching pain was overwhelming her, the awful sensation and knowledge that something vital was being ripped from her.

"It's going to be hard, but you can do it," the Doctor told her gravely, kneeling in front of her and urging her to focus. "Tell me about Rory, huh? Fantastic Rory, funny Rory, gorgeous Rory. Amy, listen to me: Do exactly as I say. Amy, please, keep concentrating. You can do this."

Images flashed through her mind, but they were blurred at the edges. Rory and her walking hand in hand on their last date, kissing on a park bench. Rory in his dad's shirt when they were little, Rory's smile when she agreed to marry him, Rory in that stupid, embarrassing shirt with their faces printed on it. RoryRoryRoryRory… But he was fading. She couldn't remember the colour of his eyes, the feel of his hand in hers, the sound of his voice when he said her name…

"I can't," she choked out.

The Doctor insisted, almost pleading, "You can, you can do it! I can't help you unless you do. We can still save his memory."

She willed herself to focus, putting all of her energy into bringing her memories of Rory back into focus. She fought against the hurt, against the mental drain, and slowly the image of Rory began to solidify in her mind again. She could remember his face, the kind green eyes, the pointed chin, the short hair and the nose; she remembered how he made her feel, as though she shone brighter than any star in any of the galaxies -

And then the TARDIS jolted, and Amy was thrown off the jump seat and on to the floor. Her concentration broke immediately, and when Amy Pond sat back up again she didn't remember Rory Williams' existence at all.


	9. Part Two: Promises

**Part Two**

**- Promises –**

Amy Pond was staring out at a nebula of stars, a rough circle of blues and purples and pinks, amazing clouds of colour made all the more striking against the black backdrop of deep space. She was leaning against the frame of the open TARDIS doorway, legs crossed at the ankles and face pensive as the wonders of the universe drifted by.

"Still not used to it, ey Pond?" the Doctor asked joyously from behind her, and she heard the thud of his boots hitting the floor as he jumped down the steps and strode over to join her. She felt his weight on her shoulders as he threw an arm around her, and smiled as he gestured grandly out into space. "Never-ending, constantly evolving and changing and growing and shrinking and never the same, not for one single moment – and it's all ours! All of time and space, everywhere and anywhere!"

He whooped gleefully and spun away from the door, bounding back up to the centre console, flicking switches and pressing buttons in a far more complicated pattern than Amy felt was necessary. She turned to watch him, smiling at his infectious happiness, and then sauntered slowly to the stair railing. She leant one elbow on it and cupped her chin in her palm, watching her friend as he turned the cold tap three times to the left and then back once to the right.

"Doctor," she began slowly, hesitating slightly. The Doctor stepped to the side so that he was in her full view and looked at her encouragingly. "I was wondering… well, it's a bit boring, but I – I have somewhere I'd like us to go."

The time lord's eyebrows raised in anticipation, and he nodded. His enthusiasm slipped a bit, however, as he questioned, "A bit boring, you say?"

"Well, yeah, I mean -" Amy fumbled for the right thing to say, tapping her light green nails against the railing like she was trying to distract herself. "I'd like to go to London."

"London," the Doctor repeated, and she couldn't read his expression. "London, when?"

"Now," she answered, "I mean, present day."

"Oh-kay," he said, drawing out the two syllables. "Anywhere in particular?"

"Montague Street," Amy recalled the address from memory. "I had a – an old friend, who lives there. At least, he used to live there. I hope he still does."

The Doctor was idly twisting the hot tap back and forth. "So you want to pay him a visit?"

"Well, I want to prove to him that you're real."

His features widened with surprise, mouth opening and eyes popping slightly. "You want to prove that I'm real?" He sounded a bit flabbergasted.

"Yes." Amy rolled her eyes and walked up to join him by the console. "We fought about it, and I'd like to have the last word."

"Nice to know you don't hold onto a grudge," the Doctor murmured, and Amy scoffed. She was about to make a witty retort when he became suddenly nervous, inquiring in a small voice, "You didn't lose contact – I mean, it's not because of your fight over me that you stopped talking to this friend, is it?"

Instinctively, she reached out and grabbed his hands, which he had started to wring anxiously.

She looked into his blue eyes and said earnestly, "No, no of course not! It's not your fault, why would you think it was your fault?"

Looking only slightly appeased, he slipped one of his hands out of her grasp and scratched his cheek in that nervous tic of his.

"I don't know, I just thought – maybe, I mean – I tend to… to ruin things for everyone," he mumbled, avoiding her gaze. "Friendships, and – and relationships, I just mess them all up."

"Doctor," Amy began, a hint of sternness to her voice, "You do not _ruin _things. You make them a million times better." She squeezed the hand she still held, and a wave of affection rushed over her at the small, grateful smile that elicited. She pulled him into a hug, wrapping her arms around his neck and murmuring into his mop of thick, brown hair, "You're my best friend, and you're amazing."

When they parted Amy was pleased to see the Doctor looked a bit chuffed at what she'd said. She gave him a broad smile and he cleared his throat and straightened his bowtie, trying not to look too happy – almost as though he didn't deserve it. Why he tried to keep such a tight hold on his emotions, why he was so hard on himself, Amy wasn't sure, but it always upset her. Before she could further reassure him, however, he was turning back to the console and flicking a purple switch up near the time rotor.

"So!" he exclaimed with all of his usual enthusiasm, "To London, 2010! To see…?"

"His name's Sherlock," Amy filled in, stepping up and leaning against the console next to him. "Sherlock Holmes."

The Doctor's head whipped up so quickly that he almost lost his balance. His hand slipped and pushed a red lever down, and the TARDIS jolted violently to the side. Amy scrambled for purchase on the console but she couldn't grasp anything and flew forward bodily, slamming into the railing and feeling all of the air get knocked from her lungs.

"Nonono!" She heard the time lord yelling behind her as she gripped the steel for dear life, "I'm sorry, please stop!"

With gravity holding her exactly where she was, Amy wasn't able to turn around to see what he was actually doing, so she wasn't sure if it was something he did or his words alone that made the TARDIS stop swinging wildly.

As soon as the ship was steady, she swung around and flipped her hair out of her face, giving him an exasperated look when he peered sheepishly at her through the glass of the time rotor.

"What was that?" she demanded, walking across the once again flat surface to reach him.

"Uh – just a bit of a slip," the Doctor explained, waving his hands erratically in the air.

"What happened though?" Amy insisted, staring at him as he grabbed the hanging screen and pulled it over to him. "Why did you look at me like that?"

"Like what?" He used the screen to hide his face.

She tilted her head to the side and gazed at him, eyes widened in curiosity. "Like that, all flustered and surprised and – weird."

"Weird?" The Doctor squeaked, offended. "Are you saying my face looks weird?"

"No!" Amy hurriedly amended, annoyed that he was twisting her words. "Well, your chin is a bit -" At a disgruntled look from the time lord she cut herself off.

"I slipped, nothing more," he said, somehow managing to come across as both forceful and flippant at the same time. "Human error and all that."

"But you're not human," she pointed out.

He waved his hands and slipped past her, pretending to be distracted by pressing the keys on the typewriter.

Amy debated pushing the matter, finding out what she'd said to make the Doctor look at her like a deer caught in headlights, but as she observed his now downcast gaze glued stubbornly to the typewriter beneath his hands she decided perhaps it was best to drop it for now. Whatever it was, she was sure he'd tell her in time. He told her everything, after all; she just had to wait for him to be ready. And if Amy was good at anything, it was waiting for her Raggedy Doctor.

"So, are we going to London?" She changed the subject casually.

"What?" The Doctor looked up, slightly startled, as though he had momentarily forgotten she was there. Their eyes met and his features relaxed, and he flashed her a smile, "Oh, yes. London, 2010. Should be landing… now."

"We're here?"

"Yep!" The Doctor gleefully ran to the door, grasping her hand on the way past and pulling her along behind him. "London, the heart of the British Empire! Less so, perhaps, in the twenty-first century than it has been in the past, but still – I have fond memories of this place."

"A bit of a soft spot for queen and country, ey?" Amy nudged him in the side with her elbow.

He winked at her and then threw the doors open, revealing that they'd landed on a footpath almost exactly opposite the flat Holmes had taken Amy back to three years earlier.

"Ah, London," the Doctor said wistfully, stepping out onto the pavement and taking a deep breath. "I haven't been here in a while."

"Did you land here on purpose?" she questioned, following him out and pulling the doors closed behind her.

She felt strange, standing on this road. She remembered lying in the centre of the street and pointing at stars, storming away when Holmes insulted her, nearly getting run over… Her stomach twisted at just the memory of how scary that had been, lying on the hard asphalt with the blinding headlights of the car zooming towards her. She shivered, and the Doctor gave her a strange look.

"You did say Montague Street?" There was a slightly quizzical tone to his words.

"Yeah, I did, but – that's his flat, right there." Amy pointed at the white façade across the road. "How did you know which one it was?"

The Doctor was striding across the road already, not even checking for oncoming traffic, and he threw her a glance over his shoulder as he answered, "Lucky guess."

She hurried after him, watching as he rapped his knuckles against the door. There was no response at first, and Amy started to lose her nerve. She was just about to tap on the Doctor's shoulder, tell him that they should forget about it, maybe they could go visit Space Florida instead, she didn't really need to see Holmes again anyway – When the door opened.

Amy dropped her arm, feeling a disconcerting mix of disappointment and relief when she saw that it wasn't Holmes who had answered the door.

"Hello?" The man was older, with a severely receding hairline and a lined face that sagged in the cheeks.

"Hi," the Doctor greeted, flashing a charming grin.

He glanced at Amy, expecting her to take control of the conversation, and she stepped forward to talk. "Hi, uh, does Sherlock Holmes still live here?" she asked a bit bluntly, figuring it was best to just get straight to the point.

The man shook his head slowly, crows feet crinkling in the corners of his eyes as he squinted in concentration. "No, no, he hasn't lived in this building for a long time," he told them, and Amy sighed. "Probably about two years now?"

"Do you know where he moved to?" she inquired, trying to sound politely interested rather than like a stalker.

The Doctor opened his mouth to respond, but the man answered, "Can't be sure, but Mrs. Delphi says he's moved in to Baker Street. Two-two-something-or-other..."

"Thank you," the Doctor said, leaning forward as though tipping a hat in thanks. "You've been very helpful."

They said their goodbyes and started heading back to the TARDIS. The Doctor had his hands in his pockets and looked quite merry, but Amy was growing more anxious with each step.

"There's a lot of houses on Baker Street," she hedged.

"He said 'two-two-something', that narrows it down a bit." The Doctor sounded confident that they'd find Holmes quite easily.

"Even so, it'll take us a while to find him. And we don't really want to annoy all those people by knocking on their doors…"

"Amy." The Doctor turned to look at her, putting his hands on her shoulders and searching her face. "Are you okay? We can leave, if you don't want to do this."

Amy thought about his words, imagined dematerialising in the TARDIS and leaving her memories of Sherlock Holmes behind. After all, he was the one who'd suddenly stopped replying to her texts. He was the one who hadn't called her, even though she'd explicitly asked him to. He was the one who had essentially called time on their… friendship - If the connection they'd forged over their one night together could even be called that.

She shook her head.

"I told him I'd come back to see him," she explained. "I haven't spoken to him in so long, I'm not sure if he even wants to see me. But I promised, so I might as well try, right?"

The Doctor looked kind of proud. "If it makes you feel any better, I think I know which house we'll find Sherlock Holmes in."

"You do?"

The Doctor nodded, "Mhmm."

"How?" Amy asked as they resumed walking and the Doctor clicked his fingers to unlock the TARDIS.

"I looked him up on the TARDIS. In 2010 he has a roommate who has a blog, detailing the cases they work. I checked their contact information on there," he told her. "221B Baker Street."

"If you know he lives on Baker Street now why did you take us to Montague Street?" She raised her eyebrows questioningly.

He shrugged and laughed nervously, "No reason in particular. I just wanted to – uh -"

He mumbled something incomprehensible, complete gibberish, and practically ran away from her, racing back up to the centre console and typing in the new coordinates.

"You weren't sure what year we were in, were you?" Amy was incredulous.

"I know what year we're in!" the Doctor retorted.

She laughed at him, "Yeah, _now _you do, you numpty."

He got a bit sulky at that, but soon perked up, asking audaciously, "So, seeing as we know the exact address – and year – shall we skip the pleasantries and invite ourselves in? Or should we park on the street and use the front door?"

Feeling a burst of confidence, Amy smiled cheekily. "How does the living room sound to you?"

"Better than the kitchen, kitchens are always a bit too small for my liking," the Doctor replied, finishing typing in the coordinates and then twirling a purple lever with a dramatic flourish.

There was no jolting this time, no being thrown about roughly and no loud noises of protest from the TARDIS. In fact, their trip was so smooth that when the time lord stepped away from the controls Amy actually asked, "Are we here?"

"Right in the middle of their living room, if I've parked her correctly," the Doctor informed her, strutting down the steps and past her to the door. "Which I always do." He grinned at her over his shoulder, and then, before she could even react, he'd opened the doors and stepped out into the room beyond them, declaring in his most jaunty voice, "Hullo, I'm the Doctor. Amy told you we'd be paying a visit?"

Amy heard the sound of breaking china, and a muffled exclamation of _"Bloody hell!" _followed by Holmes' deep baritone exclaiming, "He's real!"

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath in, and followed the Doctor, spurred on by the thought of Holmes' expression when he realised just how wrong he'd been. Oh yes, Amy Pond had definitively beaten him this time.

* * *

**a.n. **and because I'm awful I'm going to leave it there. I've got inspiration for this story suddenly and while it's here I'm just going to keep making the most of it. thanks as always for all of your amazing feedback, it honestly makes it so much easier to write when there are gorgeous people like you guys telling me how much you're enjoying it. I'm slowly replying to each individual review I've received for the last three chapters; if you haven't got a review reply from me yet expect it over the weekend, I'm aiming to have them done by Monday.  
in the next chapter exactly where they're at in their timelines will be revealed, but it doesn't really effect this update; all you need to know, really, is that this is set in the time where Rory was erased by the crack, so the Doctor's feeling quite guilty about it and acting a bit strange towards Amy, but of course she doesn't know why. for DW at least, this entire part of Dark Blue could quite possibly be canon - one of Amy and the Doctor's many adventures that we just didn't get to see on screen. for Sherlock the line between canon compliance and utterly impossible, crazy fanfic is a bit fuzzier, but as always I'm trying my damnest to keep both the plot and the characters true to the source material. please let me know how I'm going with it, and look forward to lots of interaction between all the characters next chapter!


	10. Part Two: Clients

**- Clients –**

As soon as she stepped out of the TARDIS doors, Amy's eyes were drawn straight to Holmes. Against the backdrop of rich burgundies and dark browns that made up 221B, Holmes was ensconced in shades of blue – light blue pyjamas, a dark blue robe, his pale blue eyes staring at Amy as though he'd never expected to see her again. He was older but he was still gorgeous, with the same high cheekbones, smooth, pale skin and lean body.

She hadn't expected to be so happy to see him again, but she couldn't hide her smile.

"I told you I'd come back," she said in greeting.

Holmes didn't reply. He merely held her gaze steadily for a moment before walking around the police phone box, scraping his eyes up and down the wood panelling and taking in every small detail.

"Sorry, _who are you_?"

Amy turned her head to see a shorter blonde man standing in the doorway of the kitchen. His jacket was the same dark green colour as the wall of the room behind him, at his feet there was a mess of shattered china and spilt tea, and in his hands he held a handgun, pointed straight at the Doctor.

The unintimidated time lord took it upon himself to make the introductions. He stepped across the room in two huge strides and clasped the man's hands in both of his own, ignoring the gun completely and shaking them vigorously. "Hello, I'm the Doctor and this is my friend Amy. Sorry to just drop in on you like this, but Amy wanted to come see her old friend…"

"Old friend?" the man questioned, glancing between Amy and Holmes, who was now peering intently at the instructions written on the door of the TARDIS.

In that millisecond of distraction, the Doctor grabbed the gun out of his grip, emptied the cartridge and tossed the now useless weapon onto the couch and the bullets onto the ground.

"I wouldn't say friends, exactly - " Amy began to disagree, hiding how impressed she was with the Doctor's quick reflexes.

At the same time Holmes seemed to snap out of a trance, and he waved a hand at Amy but kept his eyes on the blonde man, who was staring at the Doctor in shock. "John, this is Amelia Pond. Amelia Pond, meet Doctor John Watson – and _you_ must be the Doctor."

He focused on the time lord, taking in the eccentric outfit of a tweed jacket, red bow tie and braces, black trousers and boots. Amy watched as her best friend came face to face with the world's only consulting detective. The two stared each other down, and the room went silent as a battle for dominance was waged.

Then the Doctor smiled and shook Holmes' hand. "Sherlock Holmes, great to meet you. I'm a huge fan of your work."

"Fan?" Amy and John asked at the same time.

"Oh yeah," the Doctor said breezily, walking over to the mantle and picking up the skull sitting there. "I've read all of your blog entries."

"You – you've read my blog," John repeated, sounding dumbstruck.

Amy shook her head. "But you only just found the blog…"

"Fast reader." The Doctor tapped his forehead with the skull and then grimaced, presumably because it was harder than he'd expected. He scowled at the skeletal face and then placed it back above the fireplace. "Besides, there's not many entries. How long have you two been together?"

"Together? No, no, we're not together," John said firmly.

The Doctor blinked at him, brunette fringe flopping over his forehead and adding to his air of befuddlement. "But the blog -"

"Why does everyone assume we're together?" John asked exasperatedly, looking skyward.

Amy giggled, and Holmes shot her a glare that she readily returned. She explained, "He _means_, how long have you been solving crimes together?"

"Oh," John said, and then his light green eyes widened as realisation sunk in. "_Oh. _Yes. Of course he does."

"How does it work?" Holmes asked of the blue box still sitting in the middle of their flat, cutting across anything that John would have said next.

"The TARDIS?" The Doctor dropped down into one of the armchairs, long limbs bending as he settled into the soft, maroon cushions. "It's very complicated, human minds can't really comprehend it."

"Try me." Holmes' eyes were like ice and his tone was sharp enough to cut as he loomed over the Doctor, hands in the pockets of his dressing gown and dark hair curling against the collar.

An inexplicable expression crossed the Doctor's face, and then his lips twitched into a smirk. Amy knew instantly that he didn't believe for a second that Holmes would be able to understand how the ship worked, but because he'd pushed the Doctor was going to explain it anyway – which would embarrass Holmes, inflate the Doctor's ego and lead to a huge argument.

Thankfully, John spoke up and stopped that scenario occurring. "Wait, _human minds_? What do you mean, human minds?"

"I mean exactly what I said – human minds," the Doctor repeated. "What else could I mean? It's a pretty specific phrase, I don't think I left much room for misinterpretation."

John laughed shortly, "But that makes it sound like – like you're _not _human."

The Doctor peered up at him and asked, "Yes, and?"

John's laugh turned into a choke. "You – You're not human?"

"Nope," the Doctor told him, leaning back and crossing one leg over the other. "I'm an alien. Well, to _you _I'm an alien. To _me, you're _the aliens."

"You look human though!" John exclaimed. His eyes had grown so wide that his eyebrows were now almost at his hair line.

"_You _look Time Lord, thank you," the Doctor rebutted, and Amy rolled her eyes. "We came first."

"You're a Time Lord." Holmes continued staring down at the stranger who was sitting comfortably in his armchair. "If you're an alien, what are you doing here?"

"I told you, Amy wanted us to come and visit -"

"Wait, how do you two know each other? Sherlock, did you know about this?" John was getting more and more flustered as each new piece of information was revealed.

"I had heard of the Doctor, John, but I didn't believe it," Holmes answered his second question and ignored the first.

"Oh, that's right," Amy said dryly, sitting on the arm of the Doctor's chair, "You didn't believe _me _when I told you about him, but you believed those other people's stories."

"The more people you have purporting the same story, the more likely there is to be a grain of truth in it," Holmes snapped.

He was standing close to her now, so close that if she'd reached out her arms she could have enveloped him in a hug, pulled him close and – and she felt a blush rising along her cheeks at just the thought. She leant back into the Doctor, reassuring herself of his presence and putting slightly more distance between herself and Holmes.

"Okay, so you're an alien -" John pointed at the Doctor, "and you… are too?" he asked Amy.

"No, no, I'm human," Amy replied.

"He crash landed his ship in her backyard when she was seven," Holmes elaborated, "only to leave. And then he came back to her when she was nineteen. Oh, you left again, though, didn't you – but you obviously returned once more."

The Doctor suddenly looked incredibly sheepish. "It was an accident, it was supposed to just be a short trip into the future -"

"Are we talking about _time travel _now?" John gaped.

"Oh yes!" The Doctor jumped up and wandered over to the blue police box. He leant against the door and said proudly, "This is my TARDIS; stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space. Travels anywhere and anywhen in the universe, and sometimes outside it, although that's never really a good thing."

John blinked, shook his head and then rubbed his eyes. "You want me to believe that that – that _box _is a space ship?"

"And time ship, don't forget the time travel," Amy said helpfully.

"It's not a _ship _of any sort, it's just a police phone box," John protested.

"No no no, it just _looks _like a police phone box from the 1960s. The Chameleon Circuit's broken," the Doctor explained thoughtfully, "I've been meaning to fix that; haven't quite gotten round to it…"

"So it's got a feature that allows it to camouflage with its surroundings," Holmes stated. "But you've broken it."

Amy clasped her hands together in a nervous attempt to stop them from shaking as he swept his gaze over the Doctor and on to her. His blue eyes held hers and ignited memories of the last time they'd been together. Her hand instinctively rose to her neck, where his dark blue scarf had been when they'd said goodbye. She wondered if he really had given up hope of ever seeing her again.

"No, I didn't break it," the Doctor retorted, clearly offended. "It just sort of… broke…" His sentence trailed off and he skewed his mouth contemplatively.

"I still don't understand." John stepped forward and finally got a good look at the TARDIS for himself, frowning deeply.

"Don't worry," Amy said, standing up and lazily folding her arms over her stomach; She was a strong believer in faking confidence until she felt it for real. "It's a lot to take in."

John made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. "Yeah, it is a bit. Where did you come from? You just sort of… _appeared_, in the middle of our lounge!"

"Nifty, isn't it?" The Doctor grinned idiotically and swung himself around to face the kitchen. "Do you have any jammy dodgers?"

"Jammy-? – No, I don't think we have any jammy dodgers," John answered, shaking his head.

The Doctor sighed deeply at the news, looking downcast; and then was hit with a sudden burst of enthusiasm. He clapped his hands together and looked expectantly at Amy. "_So, _Pond – shall we be getting on then?"

Amy couldn't hide her surprise at his sudden change in tone. "Leave? Already?"

"This wasn't just a quick visit?" the Time Lord asked, eyes sparkling. She got the distinct impression that he had a hidden agenda, but she didn't have a clue what it could be.

"Uh – I guess," she answered slowly, glancing sideways to see Holmes' reaction.

He'd tensed up, shoulders rigid underneath his dressing gown, but she couldn't see his face. She looked at John, who was gaping at them in disbelief.

"Well then," the Doctor said cheerily, "We'll be off. Thanks for having us. Shame about the jammy dodgers, every house should have a packet."

He walked towards the TARDIS and held his palm out, ready to push the wooden doors open. Amy lingered behind him, warring with her desire to stay and have a proper conversation with Holmes. The Doctor put his hand against the door, and just as she was about to tell him to stop, ask if they could stay just a little while longer, surely it wouldn't hurt to wait twenty minutes for the next adventure – two things caused the Doctor to stop in his tracks.

The first - and most noticeable to Amy - was that Holmes himself said, "Stop." It wasn't a question, it was a statement, said quietly but firmly. When Amy heard it her heart almost seemed to skip a beat, because it seemed that Holmes did want her to stay. It was probably more likely that he just wanted to know about the TARDIS and the Doctor and wasn't actually interested in her at all – but, then again, the way he looked at her at that moment made her think twice.

The second thing was the appearance of a woman at the door of the flat. She looked to be in her fifties or sixties, with a kind face and dressed in a dark purple, knee-length dress.

"Boys," she was saying, still glancing over her shoulder back down the stairs that led to the main door, "Have you seen the news? There's terrible flooding going on -" She finally noticed the TARDIS, and her eyes went wide. She stared at Amy and the Doctor in some degree of horror and said, "Oh, I didn't realise that you had clients in. Is this a part of a new case?"

"Yes, Mrs Hudson," John answered way too quickly to be casual. Amy guessed that he didn't want to startle the woman by even attempting to explain the truth.

"You boys are working some strange cases lately," Mrs Hudson tutted. Her demeanour changed to a motherly one as she made her way to Amy and shook her hand. "Lovely to meet you dear, I'll go get some tea and snacks. You look like you could use some nice biscuits."

"I was just saying some jammy dodgers would be nice," the Doctor said, flashing her his most charming smile.

"I'll go get some my dear," she said, smiling back. "Don't mind me, interrupting your case work. I didn't even hear you come in!"

"Before you do," the time lord said, stopping her as she went to go, "what were you saying about flooding?"

"Oh, it's just terrible," she told him, suddenly sombre. "The coast is flooding – global warming, they say. They think it might even cause the Thames to overflow. Climate change and all that, it's awful."

"Flooding the Thames…" the Doctor said, scratching his chin.

Mrs Hudson was distracted by John's smashed cup, however, and quickly changed the topic, exclaiming, "Oh, what happened here? You've made such a mess! I'll have to clean that up; wait here, I'll go and get the biscuits and my broom. Be careful not to step on the china."

"Lovely house keeper you've got," the Doctor said brightly as she left to go back downstairs.

"I'm not the house keeper, I'm the land lady!" Mrs Hudson yelled back.

Holmes' lips twitched into a smile and John seemed to relax for the first time since their arrival. The Doctor stepped away from the phone box and repositioned himself back in the burgundy armchair, settling down and smiling at a confused Amy.

"Didn't you just say we were going?" she questioned, pointing to the TARDIS.

He waved a hand dismissively and said, "Didn't you hear? Mrs Hudson's gone to get us some biscuits. We can't leave now. John, could you put the kettle on? Can't have biscuits without tea!"

Amy sighed and rolled her eyes. "Of course."

"So you're staying now?" John asked, double-checking just what was going on.

"Apparently we are," she replied, giving him a friendly smile.

Holmes raised an eyebrow at her and sank into the black leather chair opposite the Doctor. He wrapped his robe around himself with a dramatic flourish and said, "John, get our new clients some tea, would you?"

* * *

**a.n. **blergh this was hard. a lot of personalities to introduce to each other. sherlock is uncharacteristically quiet because the doctor is something completely new and he's trying to suss out as much about him as he can. john asks a lot of questions because what else would you do if a phone box appeared in your living room? amy is also a bit quieter than usual because she's nervous about seeing sherlock again. and the doctor is the doctor. i hope that all came across clearly in the chapter itself and my explanation was totally unnecessary. now that introductions are done their characters will be a lot more clearly defined over the next few adventurous chapters.  
as always, thank you so much for reading! alerts and favourites are great but my reviewers are my favourites. also i'm loving all the asks i'm getting about this story on my tumblr, if you have any questions or anything at all you want to discuss feel free to send me an ask (the link is on my profile). and if anyone wants to make some fanart for this story that would be totally awesome too! thanks for being such amazing readers.


	11. Part Two: Impossibilities

**- Impossibilities –**

Amy was slightly boggled by the scene before her. The Doctor was perched quite comfortably in an armchair, almost entirely hidden behind a broadsheet newspaper. Occasionally she'd catch a glimpse of him when he lowered the paper to grab another jammy dodger, but for the most part he'd retreated into detective mode and she knew better than to interrupt. Nothing about that was too peculiar, in itself. No, what was peculiar was that Sherlock Holmes was pacing behind the Doctor, repeatedly asserting that they had far more important matters to discuss than a slight rise in water levels due to the icecaps melting. And, even more peculiar than that, was the fact that the Doctor was managing to totally ignore Holmes, even when he started trying to pick the lock to the TARDIS.

"She won't let you do that," he said, the only sign that he'd even noticed anything, and then he went straight back to reading the paper.

"Is he always this focused?" John Watson asked Amy, handing her a fresh cup of tea.

She was seated in the chair opposite the Doctor, having taken the spot after Sherlock abandoned it to continue his observation of the phone box. She tilted her head to give John a bemused smile.

"I wish. He's normally jumping around from one topic to another, you can hardly ever get him to sit still," she replied.

John took a sip of his drink and cleared his throat before asking, "Is he – Are you two a – a couple?"

Amy nearly inhaled her tea. "No," she coughed. "No, no the Doctor's not – I mean, I don't think he's interested. In me. Like that."

God, that was awkward. Why was that awkward?

John was trying not to look anywhere in particular as he nodded and made a vague noise of acknowledgement. Amy saw him glance at Holmes, however, and she made a point to keep her own eyes locked firmly on the china cup she held in her hands.

"So, how do you know Sherlock then?" John asked in a lighter tone, but she didn't miss the fact that he was still on the same train of thought, trying to figure out her relationships.

"We met a few years ago," she began, debating over how much she should share. "At his birthday party."

"Oh, so through mutual friends then?" John guessed.

Amy laughed, but to everyone's surprise it was Holmes who answered, "Lestrade hired her to embarrass me. She was a kissogram."

It was John's turn to choke on his drink. "Sorry, a _what_?"

"A kissogram," Holmes repeated, seeming to delight in Amy's embarrassment. "I would have thought you'd know all about that, John."

"What are you implying?" John asked, straightening up and glaring at his flatmate.

"Was it a laugh?" the Doctor inquired, finally folding the newspaper away.

"What?" everyone asked at once.

"Amy being the kissogram at your party, was it a laugh? She told me that's what the job was meant to be," he clarified, looking around at them innocently.

"Oh," was all John said, seemingly lost for words.

Holmes' jaw was working as though he couldn't decide whether to ignore the question or make a witty retort, so Amy quickly answered, "It was. It was great fun."

She glanced at Holmes out of the corner of her eye, and was glad to see him staring at her. His face was impassive but his sharp blue eyes were alive and entirely focused on her, and with her confidence slowly restoring she lifted her chin and raised an eyebrow, daring him to disagree. He didn't take the bait though, merely turning back to the Doctor and saying, "If you're quite done reading every newspaper in London, would you care to prove your claims about this phone box?"

The Doctor smirked. "I don't feel the need to prove anything. Do you, Amy?"

She shook her head, smirking right back at him, "Nope."

"Sherlock, it just appeared in the middle of our flat," John said reasonably, "I don't think they're lying to us."

"It doesn't make _sense, _though," Holmes snapped. "Everything about this is impossible."

"And isn't that why you like it?" Amy asked, voice soft and far more intimate than she'd intended.

Holmes made a begrudging noise from the back of his throat and spun away from them, his dressing gown flaring out around his knees dramatically. He didn't seem the least bit embarrassed to be seen in his pyjamas, and Amy had to wonder how often he was leaving the apartment if he was so content to stay undressed well into the afternoon.

"I suppose I can take you for a spin," the Doctor mused, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "I would like to take a trip to the coast, see what's happening with these floods."

"What is it about these floods that has you so concerned, Doctor?" Holmes asked, the slightest hint of condescension to his words.

"Oh, it's nothing really," the time lord said, shrugging as he stood. "Only the fact that for three weeks now the town of Southend-on-Sea has suffered from sea levels up to a metre higher than normal and has been hit by three separate electrical storms in the past fortnight alone."

There was a beat of silence as everyone processed his words and the challenge in his eyes, and then Amy asked, "And you think something alien could be causing it?"

"I think we should at least check it out," the Doctor replied.

Holmes scoffed, directing a glare at the front door of the TARDIS. "You've supposedly got a machine that can go anywhere in time and space, and you want to travel to Southend-on-Sea?"

"I want to make sure there isn't something dangerous happening there. And if you want to travel inside my TARDIS, you need to remember one thing; it's my ship, my rules," the Doctor declared, stepping in front of Holmes.

Amy slowly stood, preparing herself to step in between the two of them if either refused to back down from this challenge. She felt the tension emanating from where John stood beside her, ready to do the same at the slightest provocation.

Holmes straightened his robe, keeping his gaze firmly locked on the Doctor's, and then he sniffed, "We go with you to Southend to appease your curiosity -" here the Doctor opened his mouth to protest, but Holmes continued, "- and then I get to choose where we go next."

The Doctor thought about it for a moment, and then he straightened his bowtie and said, "Fine. You can come. And you can pick the next destination, but only if you're well behaved!"

The consulting detective looked ready to send a scathing remark at the Doctor for that, but John cut him off, saying warningly, "_Sherlock._"

Amy watched him instantly retreat, relaxing his features and taking the smallest of steps away from the Doctor, giving him space to put the TARDIS key in the lock. She looked at short, unassuming John Watson and then back to the elegant, arrogant Sherlock Holmes and tried to piece the two together in her mind. They were a team, that much was obvious – they'd never actually answered the question of how long they'd been working or living together, but Amy got the feeling that it had been a few months at least. The flat had traces of Holmes everywhere, from the skull on the mantle to the pile of papers on the desk and the test tubes on the kitchen table, but there were more homely touches that could only belong to John scattered throughout – a thick, knitted jumper in the loveliest shade of cream on the arm of the couch, a pair of worn, dirty sneakers kicked off by the door, a shopping list scribbled on the back of a receipt sitting on the coffee table. And the way that they were looking at each other now, silent and yet saying so much with just one glance – they reminded Amy of herself and the Doctor.

"Well then," the Doctor said, pushing the doors open and grinning, "here she is."

He disappeared into the TARDIS, and Amy darted past the stunned Holmes to follow him inside. He was already up at the console, flipping switches and twirling dials, trying to act disinterested – but she caught him glancing down in anticipation of their reactions.

Even Holmes wasn't capable of hiding the awe that the TARDIS inspired. His jaw dropped in shock, eyes going wide as he took in the glorious sight of the console room. He walked in, running his hands along the inside wall, and John quickly followed.

"But -" he gaped, shaking his head in disbelief, "But it -"

"Go on," the Doctor egged, "say it."

John ran back outside, presumably to check the outside of the phone box, and when he reappeared he gasped, "It's bigger on the inside!"

"Yes it is!" The Doctor exclaimed, clapping his hands together.

Amy leant her hip against the centre console and smiled down at the two new comers. "What do you think, boys?"

"This is amazing," John breathed, slowly walking up the steps to join them.

"And you, Sherlock?" she asked over John's shoulder.

She'd known that his response wasn't going to be conventional, but she hadn't expected it to be quite as dramatic as him yelling, "This is _impossible_!"

The Doctor stepped around the console and said, "Ah, it may seem impossible to _you_, but this is _time lord_ technology. Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, wrapped up a neat police phone box."

"Why is it a phone box again?" John asked as Amy settled into the jump seat.

"Whenever we land, she scans the surrounding environment and determines the best disguise to fit the time period and location, and then – then she appears as a police phone box from the 1960s," the Doctor explained, trailing off at the end.

"So it's broken?" John simplified.

"Well, no… Just the chameleon circuit," the time lord argued, frowning. He bent down to stroke the console affectionately and murmured, "It's okay, old girl, you're not broken. You're perfect."

John leant over and asked Amy, "Is he – talking to the ship?"

"Yeah," she nodded, "He does that a lot."

"Does it – uh, does _she _talk back?"

Amy blinked at that. "Uh… It's not exactly _talking, _as such, but I think she communicates with him, yeah."

"But that's _impossible!_" Sherlock cut in, stomping up the steps. "None of this should be here. It can't be real."

"And yet, here we are," the Doctor replied with a grin. "And now, off to Southend-on-Sea we go!"

He pressed a button and the doors swung shut.

"But how-?" John asked, before the Doctor set the TARDIS into flight and he was knocked off his feet.

Amy clutched the jump seat beneath her and held on for dear life, and Sherlock completely lost his footing and slid into the railing. The Doctor was the only one who managed to stay upright, and he whooped with laughter when he saw them all flailing about.

"Sorry," he said, not sounding even the slightest bit sincere, "I should have told you, it can be a bit of a rough flight!"

"Where are we?" Holmes questioned, bending down and holding out one hand to help John up. His flatmate gratefully took it and got to his feet, and the two men stared at the Doctor in disbelief as he grinned at them.

"We're in the vortex," the Doctor answered. "Time Lords created it as a – a super-highway! Connecting all points of space and time and allowing us to travel anywhere we like."

"That shouldn't be possible." Holmes looked like he was close to exploding.

It must have been killing him to not understand something – especially when the Doctor was there, the most knowledgeable being in the universe. If Holmes hated anything, it was knowing less than someone else.

She looked up at him, tossing her hair over her shoulder so that she could see him clearly. "What was that saying of yours? '_Once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true_'."

Holmes looked stunned. "You remembered?"

"Of course I remembered," she replied. "I'm not the type to forget."

The Doctor yelped, and the TARDIS lurched sideways, sending Amy flying off the jump seat – and into Holmes' arms. She felt a flush rise up her cheeks as her face was pressed against his chest, his arm wound tightly around her waist, and her heart was racing.

"Sorry," she mumbled, pushing back even as her body screamed to get closer to him.

"It- it's okay." His voice sounded slightly strangled, and he still hadn't removed his hand from her hip.

She knew that she should have stepped away, but she didn't want to – she wanted to be enveloped in his arms, pressed against him, to feel his lips against hers once again.

But the Doctor broke the moment, declaring loudly, "We're here!"

With a final thud and the regular wheezing noise, the TARDIS went still. Amy regained control over her body and backed away from Holmes, furiously trying to hide her blush. She caught sight of John's expression of disbelief, and gravitated towards the Doctor for comfort.

She sidled up to him, calmed by his familiar presence, and attempted to distract herself from her own indiscretions by shifting the spotlight. "Doctor, what's wrong with you today? Your piloting seems to be a bit more… erratic than normal."

"What's wrong with _me_?" he asked, offended. "What's wrong with you, Pond? Your face is as red as your hair."

"Shut up!" she snapped, swatting his hand away as he grabbed a lock of her hair.

"Is the unflappable Amy Pond embarrassed?" he teased.

"Stop it," she whined, even as she couldn't help but giggle.

"Uh, sorry to interrupt," John said, and the two time travellers turned to look at him, "but Sherlock's gone."

"Gone?" Amy asked, hurrying over.

"Gone, outside," John clarified. "He's not exactly patient…"

"Oh, no," the Doctor sighed. He pushed his shoulders back and linked arms with both Amy and John as he walked past, pulling them down the stairs with him. "Well, we can't have Sherlock Holmes running around unchecked, can we? Let's go get him back."

And the three of them walked together into Southend-on-Sea, a town which Amy felt was totally unprepared for their arrival.

* * *

**a.n. **woo new chapter! and now the adventure can really begin.  
southend-on-sea is a real town at the mouth of the thames, but i've never been there and all information about it is coming from google, so i apologise if i get any details wrong in the next chapter.  
thanks to everyone who's been leaving encouraging asks on my tumblr, they never fail to brighten my day and they are endlessly inspiring. a huge thank you to all my readers and especially to my reviewers, you're lovely and it's your feedback that keeps this story going. let me know what you think!


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